Pantheon

The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld - hardcvr

$27.95

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Hardcover format.

The lives of three women weave together across centuries in this dazzling new novel.

Sarah, accused of being a witch, is fleeing for her life.

Ruth, in the aftermath of World War II, is navigating a new marriage and the strange waters of the local community.

Six decades later, Viv, still mourning the death of her father, is cataloging Ruth’s belongings in Ruth’s now-empty house.

As each woman’s story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that their choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men who seek to control them. But in sisterhood there is also the possibility of survival and a new way of life. Intricately crafted and compulsively readable, The Bass Rock burns bright with love and fury—a devastating indictment of violence against women and an empowering portrait of their resilience through the ages.

The most gripping thing I’ve read in ages . . . A haunted house of a novel, as intricately built as relentlessly ominous . . . It’s that rare literary novel that will give you shudders . . . Wyld is so controlled and subtle a storyteller that her themes remain elegantly beneath the surface. What carries you along is the vivid description and an atmosphere of rising dread.”
—Taylor Antrim, Vogue

“An expertly layered, quietly suspenseful novel . . . This author seizes her readers with the swift grace of the wild predators she often describes, then sets them down on terrain so richly imagined it seems to fill the senses . . . Throughout Wyld’s fiction, which transcends the category of either horror or crime, such visceral images, always sparingly employed, have a mesmerizing force that is instantly felt and eerily sustained . . . Wyld stages a plot twist as inevitable as it is shocking, a maneuver at which she excels . . . [She is] a consummately sly storyteller . . . There are unmistakable echoes here of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, not only in Wyld’s subtle depiction of a woman adrift on sinister, restless tides but also in her shrewd depiction of a ruling class inured to brutality.”
—Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal

“A haunting survival tale that lingers long after the last page . . . Steeped in grief and teeming with ghosts, Wyld’s new novel explores violence against women throughout time . . . A sense of foreboding hangs over the novel like a shroud . . . Time and time again, Wyld artfully proves the female body knows (even if the mind won’t accept) the dangers lurking all around.”
—Kirkus Reviews