Francine wrote Pine while working in publishing full time, inspired by her childhood in the Scottish Highlands and its culture of gothic storytelling. Now an editor at Sceptre, she recalls being taught about selkies at school, how they shed their sealskin to assume human form. And when you’re at the beach, a seal popping up “could easily be the head of a person”. One of the biggest literary debuts of 2020, dark secrets lie at the heart of this haunting and powerful bestselling novel set in the Scottish Highlands The last place in the UK to execute someone for witchcraft’ … woods near Dornoch. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/the Guardian Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father's turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it's no longer clear who she can trust.

Toon grew up in Sutherland and Fife, Scotland, and writes poetry under the name Francine Elena. Her poems have been published in the Sunday Times, The Best British Poetry anthologies and Poetry London. Her debut novel was longlisted for the prestigious Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. It has echoes of contemporary emerging writers like Angela Readman, Lucy Woods and Carmen Marcus. In particular, the latter’s debut, How Saints Die, shares many of the same themes and relational problems. Myth and folklore are integral to both novels, with Pine drawing on Toon’s Scottish heritage, from the ghost stories the children tell each other, to the transportative powers of ceilidh music on the locals: “Songs that bring most men to the brink of tears, before they belt out a chorus to stop themselves.”And the pain with which Toon describes the empty yearning gap in her heart for her lost mother – bereft of even memories, photographs or stories about her – is awful, but expertly rendered. The books opens (aptly enough) on Hallowe’en as Lauren and her friend Billy are going “guising” and Lauren is dressed as a vampire.

As the story creeps on, it appears as though the whole village is talking about Lauren and Niall, as though they don’t have a very good reputation. People act peculiar and off with Niall at the pub, and Lauren is relentlessly bullied by some other girls at school. But why are they talking? And how is it whenever someone sees the aforementioned mysterious women, that they never seem to remember encountering her? The characters, if given the chance, could have been developed into people that I'd be interested in reading about, but instead, I was left with characters that experience a terrible incident, or something supernatural, and all the do is lay about on the sofa, not talking about it, acting like nothing has happened.

My mum.’ The images of death are involuntary and relentless: crushed snail shells, veins in meat, vampire teeth, soil filling a mouth.”

The twists and turns keep the reader guessing and Christine’s ghost is the ever-present force which keeps them safe and eventually uncovers the reasons for her disappearance and releases her father’s demons. It's such an immersive, completely captivating experience. I should qualify that it's doubly so for me because it's essentially set in my childhood; I grew up in the North East UK rather than Scotland, but the language and setting were so nostalgic for me. But that's not to write off the author's (amazing) talent; it wasn't nostalgia but some fantastic writing that had me almost able to see these people and the setting as I read. Irgendwie fühle ich mich durch dieses Buch ein bisschen hinter die Fichte geführt, um im Bild zu beiben.

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If I had one gripe – and I do – the resolution of the novel did not quite work for me. I’m not sure how to explain it further without spoilers, but I did have issues with it! The Best British Poetry 2013 By Ahren Warner". www.wob.com. World of Books . Retrieved 25 January 2023. The edgy, offbeat prose really digs deep, it is a disjointed, haunting tale that is at turns terrifying and heart wrenching. Lauren sits at the centre of a maelstrom of adult emotion, her connection to her missing mother tennous and spiritual – meanwhile danger lurks in the forest surrounding her while her father falls apart and the community grows stranger and more off kilter by the moment. Francine Toon hat, bevor sie mit "Pine" ihren ersten Roman schrieb, Preise für ihre Gedichte gewonnen. Lauren’s mum’s strangeness is also the reason for the bullying she has to endure at school and which has become so bad that she gains comfort from the antler-handled fold-up hunting knife she’s stolen from her father’s toolbox. Only Billy and two older neighbours’ children look out for her and step in when seven-year-old Maisie seeks out every opportunity to ridicule and hurt Lauren.

Carington, Francesca (4 January 2020). "The best first novels to look out for in 2020". The Telegraph . Retrieved 29 September 2022. As a teenager in St Andrews, Toon recalls a man who pulled up beside her in a car when she was on the way to school. A moving study of memory and loss . . . both spooky and tender; drenched in a sense of place and yet eerily timeless.' Pine is beautifully written, and its isolated location – with the wildness of the forest and the claustrophobic feeling of a small community in which everyone is hiding something – is intricately realised. I’m a real fan of folk horror, and this is a novel in the best traditions of the genre, building slowly into its horrors, seeding the weird alongside the mundane. But the real star of the show is the painfully believable father-daughter relationship and its lingering sense of sadness and poverty.And ten and a half year old Lauren is the heart of this novel. She is all-but an orphan, having lost her mother Christine who disappeared when she was a baby, and having almost lost her father Niall in the drink he needs to survive his grief and loneliness. And Toon crafts her as a character with a tender balance: she is still a child and innocent loving Frozen and Disney Princess magazines and the Beano; but she also has had a maturity forced upon her early and cares for herself when her father doesn’t or can’t and cares for him when needed. Before joining The Novelry, Francine Toon was a Commissioning Editor at Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton’s literary imprint, part of Hachette UK. She published distinctive, prize-winning fiction and worked on the novels of bestselling, world-renowned authors. Just as the writer and her friends found a sense of control in shaping stories about the things they feared, Lauren finds control in her life by reading the tarot, Toon adds, which is a sort of storytelling itself. “Away from its dark history, the figure of the witch has the association of an empowered woman who isn’t necessarily tied to marriage. Who doesn’t have the same fears as women in terms of being able to look after herself. In this book I was preoccupied by the idea of vulnerable women, women who’ve disappeared or women have been abducted.”