Then Came October (Paperback)

Then Came October is a novel about a family scandal, a mystery to Mardie Carew who seeks to discover the truth about her father's death in 1897 and the missing years of her mother's life. She discovers her mother's diary which reveals not only the highly respectable and conventional world of Edith and her parents, but the darker, stranger side of Victorian life - obsessions with spiritualism and the supernatural, religious mania and eroticism.

Edith's diary tells of an intelligent but highly-suggestible young woman, whose life is changed by a series of extraordinary experiences. As a child living in Glastonbury, Edith has visions of King Arthur, as a teenager she is taken to séances and makes contact with the spirit of her dead brother. Then, following a breakdown, she is sent to recuperate with a family living in Pembrokeshire, Wales - a family who have for generations sought a fragment of the True Cross. Their search, by the time Edith joins them, has gathered pace due to the visions of an idiot savant son. The powerful bond that forms between Edith and Crantock, the savant, leads to love but ends in tragedy. In response Edith chooses to make a marriage of convenience that takes her to the isolation of the colonial community in Yokohama; her misery culminates in madness.

• Publisher: Harbour
• ISBN: 9781905128136
• Pages: 272
• Weight: 0.392