Journeys in the dead season

So little natural light falls into my cell, and I have such a limited view from my window, that at times I feel as though I am entombed within a coffin . . . Down here, deep within the soil, I must content myself with mental excursions only, tripping beneath the canopies of forests that exist solely in the mind . . . In the end there is only my voice A prisoner is on remand in Durham high security jail for what turns out to be a series of attacks on young girls across Leicestershire, culminating in abduction, rape and murder. In the autumn of 1922, Captain Crowe is on a journey across Leicestershire. He intends to visit his old comrades from the War, finish his book on horticulture, and come to terms with a past that still haunts him and a future that terrifies him. The prisoner is reading a copy of Crowe’s book, Perambulations of a Soldier: Autumn to Winter, whilst writing his own diary. Crowe’s retelling of his odyssey in his letters, their subsequent appearance within Perambulations and the prisoner’s interpretation of them, creates a macabre fusion of past and present, where fact and fiction, truth and reality begin to merge and coalesce . . . Juxtaposing the experiences of a shellshock victim in the early 1920s with the recollections of an alleged child-murderer in the present day, Journeys in the Dead Season is a masterpiece of psychological complexity and subtlety. In turns shocking and deeply moving, it is the debut of an important and compelling new literary voice.