In this case, you can tell a book by its cover. This one is a little bit dark, with flashes of brilliance, a touch of mystery and a lot of moths.
Ginny is an elderly moth expert, a recluse who rarely steps outside of the crumbling Gothic mansion where she was born and brought up. Her parents have died and she has sold the furniture, closed off most of the rooms and got rid of the help. Now she creaks around what is left of the turreted folly, being ever-so-slightly mad, but in a very level-headed way. Then Ginny’s younger sister Vivien comes home after an absence of nearly 50 years and, over a long weekend, the family’s rather peculiar history is revisited from each sister’s perspective, though these are found to have not that much in common.
There’s a little bit of technical moth stuff going on, but I confess I skimmed some of these bits in favour of finding out what it was that had kept Vivien away for all that time and why it was that she had chosen to come back. The story is, after all, really about the sisters, not the moths. It reminded me a bit of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, which I loved, and also of a Ruth Rendell book called The Water’s Lovely.
It’s the first novel for author Poppy Adams, an English filmmaker with a degree in natural sciences. She got the idea, she says, from visiting a similarly crumbling and abandoned Gothic mansion somewhere in the English countryside and finding one neatly kept room where an old woman had lived on her own until her recent death despite the fact that the rest of the place was virtually a ruin. Ginny is a fascinating main character, not always likeable, but intriguing because you’re never quite sure if she is totally barking mad or just oddly brought-up and a bit science-y and eccentric. Either way, she certainly keeps you turning the pages.
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