Born in London in 1969, I grew up all over the world as my father served the Foreign Office in New York, Kuwait, Tanzania, Dubai, Zambia and Jordan.

When a young woman arrives in a remote and far removed part of Scotland, looking to escape her troubled and shadowed past she may find that this place of peace and nature may not be as tranquil as she had hoped. I was willing to endure a certain amount of ambiguity in the hopes of seeing how everything came together at the end, but it just didn’t? When you finally find out why the narrator lost her job, the event itself and the investigation after were so improbable that I just don’t believe it would ever happen that way, even in fiction. There’s no explanation for the mysterious happenings and the book is so heavy-handed with the overall “takeaway” at the end.I also didn’t connect with the main character, which meant that the stakes weren’t that high, and I didn’t love the ending.

Sally Hinchcliffe's Hare House is a modern-day witch story, perfect for fans of Pine and The Loney. Since 1994 I have worked for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the IT department, developing databases to support its scientific work. In 2001 I took a two year sabbatical from Kew to work in Eswatini (then Swaziland) as a volunteer with Skillshare International. Eerie and subtle . . . This deliciously chilly tale dodges the expected outcome and maintains a delicate balance between psychology and witchcraft right to its disturbing end * Guardian *Described as “a folk horror tale on a Scottish estate,” the book was also a hit at the recent Wigtown Book Festival where Sally was a guest author. God, I just loved this book. I know it’s impossible, but I wish everything I read could make me feel like this: alive with excitement about what fiction can do, half-certain it was written specifically for me, and immediately desperate to read it all over again. Striking up a friendship with her landlord and his younger sister, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. And as autumn turns to winter, and a heavy snowfall traps the inhabitants of the estate within its walls, tensions rise to fever pitch.

This book gave me a real sense of otherworldliness. It is set in the modern day, there are planes and computers but it reads as if it is a long past era. It is well written, very atmospheric, the descriptions of the crumbling old country house, the remote but beautiful location, the freezing weather and of course the spooky goings on in this picturesque corner of Scotland. Beautiful yet unsettling and at times unnerving and claustrophobic. Unfortunately, I really did not like this book. Despite the beautiful prose, it was a slog to get through. The book is slow and I found myself bored several times throughout. A lot of mysterious and witchy things happen, but they never end up getting explained. I’m ok with a few things not being explained but the whole book and how it ended was just super vague. The reveal, if you can call it that, is simply implausible. I don’t like what the reveal suggested because it invalidates a lot of what the reader suspected was happening. And even with my theory of what happened I still have no idea what the hell actually happened. Just a lot of strange instances with no clear cut explanation or reasoning behind it. A beautiful, slow burn of a novel, eerie and shimmering in equal measure. The bewitching prose brilliantly evokes the bleak glories of a remote Scottish landscape, while the subtle shifts of plot and perspective lure the reader towards an unsettling denouement where nothing is quite what it seems. A dark uncanny read and all the more satisfying for that -- Mary Paulson-Ellis, author of The Other Mrs Walker and Emily Noble's DisgraceNot really sure what to make of this one and it seems a few other people have voiced the same opinion. I did listen to this as an audiobook and I think the narrator did a great job which helped to make this more engaging than it might