The Taking of Annie Thorne

Travel Guide

Travel BookTrail style to Arnhill (fictional)

A fictional town somewhere in Nottinghamshire but for a fictional setting, the sense of place is very well done. Too well in some places as this after all is a town where a girl disappeared from and now to which she returns, ‘changed’.

Excitingly CJ Tudor has said that she was inspired to create the village having been to school in Rainworth. There is a village hall and miners hall just up the road…..

Arnhill is a nondescript, depressing little village where the ghosts of the past continue to roam and where the secrets of time can be heard in whispers on the grey, hilly landscape. This is an old mining town so has been left abandoned to a large extent and where unemployment and despair live side by side.

In the local school, a well liked English teacher has killed her son and shot herself. Joe returns to the village from where his sister disappeared and then returned, and takes over the job of English teacher. He grew up here, but isn’t so much returning as running from gambling debts accrued elsewhere.

A return to the past is never going to be easy. Twenty five years ago he and four friends were involved in something they’d all rather forget. Never mind that the place is fictional, THIS is the real setting, the one of guilt and fear and of a claustrophobic feeling of never being able to escape.. An old mining town full of folk who don’t take kindly to strangers at all, live in a huddle of run down houses and even more run down pubs. The looming shadows of the abandoned pit is not far away.