'Do you believe in ghosts?'
It's 1928. Freddie Watson is still grieving for his brother, lost in the Great War. Driving through the foothills of the French Pyrenees, his car spins off the road in snowstorm. Freddie takes refuge in an isolated village and there meets a beautiful, captivating woman. They spend the night talking of love and loss and war. But by daybreak, Fabrissa has vanished and Freddie realises he holds the key to an ancient mystery that leads him deep into the mountains, to a cave that has concealed an appalling secret for 700 years...
THE WINTER GHOSTS by Kate Mosse
Published: 2009
Genre: Historical Fiction, Supernatural > Ghost Story
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
This was a hauntingly endearing tale, perfectly atmospheric, that needs to be read curled in an armchair on a cold winter's night.
Naturally, as the title suggests, this is a ghost story, but you'll find no spooks or demons to jump out and scare, only the heavy weight of loss hanging like a low veil of cloud over a village, desperate to be dispelled.
This book's set in France in the years following the first world war, when loss and grief were so commonplace it was almost seen as indulgent to show how it was affecting you. Everyone is doing their best to carry on and maintain normality, but Freddie feels the void of his brothers death acutely, and like a time bomb, it's only a matter of time before he explodes.
We join him on this quest for closure, and along the way he finds a sympathetic ear and someone with a story more devastating and chilling than his own.
There was something about this book that's resonated with me, and I'm finding it hard to articulate just what exactly it was. Perhaps its a sympathy towards a nation grieving loved ones and years lost to anxiety and uncertainty in the war. I think now more than ever, we as readers could understand that following a pandemic.
Of course, I would never dare compare the pandemic to the war directly, but the years following it are where I think we can relate. There's a sense of lingering grief, of a community trying to catch its breath, or holding it for fear of letting go; not quite recovered, but trying so hard to re-establish normality.
The isolated French village in the snowy mountain-scape was the perfect setting for this story, bleak and beautiful, eerie and entrancing with its ghostly whispers drifting over the mountain paths.
This book kindled a sadness in me, but also brought a feeling of closure from the characters journey.
I'm glad to have plucked it off my shelf at long last. It was a fast paced, haunting and consuming. I recommend!!
Zuzu 🖋
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