REVIEW by Eluned Gramich

NWR Issue 104

Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

Set just after the Second World War, Tiffany Murray’s third novel tells the story of Dieter Sugar and his family – his mother, Lilia, and older sister, Saskia – as they move away from their London home and Dieter’s beloved gang of friends, to an ancient estate near the Severn Estuary. The manor house, Sugar Hall, which Dieter is in line to inherit, is a vast and crumbling building from a distant age. There, in its unfamiliar and decaying environs, events take place which reveal a dark history and an even more terrifying present.

In the course of the novel, Murray invokes both Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden, thereby placing the narrative in an oscillating movement between childhood romanticism and Gothic realism...

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