Why a Booktrail?
1939, 2006: Beware of those marshes..
Call of the Curlew
Why a Booktrail?
1939, 2006: Beware of those marshes..
What you need to know before your trail
Virginia Wrathmell has always known she will meet her death on the marsh.
One snowy New Year’s Eve, at the age of eighty-six, Virginia feels the time has finally come.
New Year’s Eve, 1939. Virginia is ten, an orphan arriving to meet her new parents at their mysterious house, Salt Winds. Her new home sits on the edge of a vast marsh, a beautiful but dangerous place. War feels far away out here amongst the birds and shifting sands – until the day a German fighter plane crashes into the marsh. The people at Salt Winds are the only ones to see it.
What happens next is something Virginia will regret for the next seventy-five years, and which will change the whole course of her life.
Travel Guide
Salt Winds
The grand gothic house in the book where the story takes place. This is an old, stone house where the wind makes noises, where orphan Virginia comes to stay and where she is told she must never go up to the attic.
Sadly the house is fictional. As are the marshes, but there are many places in England which evokes this kind of dark atmosphere of remote, moorland and marshes. Where one house stands out on the hillside and where the woods hide your screams.
“There is nothing to se out there, in the vast blackness”
“She can hear the sucking sands and the boom of distant tides”
Tolesbury Marsh
There is a village called Tollesbury and neighbouring marshes where you can actually see many of the birds as described in the book. Spotting a curlew? Now there’s a shivery thought.
The marshes are ominous and deathly to those who get trapped there. The sinking sands claim victims all the time and every character in the book is told of their danger. A place to avoid. A place to fear.
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
I may have read this on in summer but being on the bleak marsh moors in the novel cooled me down very nicely indeed. There was a metaphorical fire crackling in the background flashing clues here and there as I read, before the darkness fell once again.
From the very first page, there is a strange sense of …something on the Moors. You’re never really sure who are what is out there. It had a feel of Wuthering Heights and The Woman in Black with a hint of Kate Mosse’s Taxidermist with its skulls and gothic looking birds.
There’s something creepy and fascinating about an old woman living under bleak conditions thinking over her life and holding a skull in her hands. She’s remembering when she found a German aircraft crashed on the moors and when someone tried to rescue him. What happened next?
Well the marshes have the biggest story to tell, they see and feel everything, they reflect the actions of the people who live there on its soil, landscape, in its very essence. Guilt, loss, love, thinking back, thinking things over, wondering what if, and living with the consequences…all powerful emotions tossed and thrown around in the Moor winds.
Hauntingly atmospheric. Recommended. And can I just say what an utterly brilliant cover!
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Call of the Curlew
Destination : England Author/Guide: Elizabeth Brooks Departure Time: 1939, 2005
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