The opening volume of a Victorian saga that traces the formation of a soul. Charles Strange is just a boy when we meet him at White Littleham Rectory in Hampshire, watching his fragile mother fade from an illness no one will name. She confides in him, this child, about the possibility of her own death and he clings to hope. But hope is a fragile thing when you're young and the world is about to shatter. What follows is the dismantling of Charles's childhood: his mother dies, his father remarries, and the quiet certainties of his early life are swept away. Mrs. Henry Wood, famed for East Lynne, writes with characteristic emotional force about the wounds that shape us before we even understand we've been wounded. This is Victorian fiction at its most direct about the violence hidden inside family life, the way loss rewrites a child's inner world.
