The Stopped Heart

March 21, 2016
This overlong novel from British author Myerson (The Quickening) focuses on two families living in the same village near Ipswich in Essex, separated by 150 years. In the present, grief-stricken Mary Coles and her husband move to a run-down cottage with a large back garden, once a farmyard, to seek a new start after a tragedy that's only gradually revealed. Meanwhile, in the past, 13-year-old Eliza narrates the story of a red-haired stranger, James Dix, whose sudden arrival at her family's farm leads inexorably to trouble. Dix is a seducer whose tendency to violence gradually becomes clear, and wary Eliza is only one of his targets. Back in the present, Mary's married neighbor, Eddie, begins paying inappropriate attention to her. The forward-looking visions of Eliza's four-year-old sister, Lottie, and Mary's visions of the past connect the experiences of the two families, but this contrivance fails to unite the two stories into a suspenseful whole. Agent: Karolina Sutton, Curtis Brown (U.K.).

January 15, 2016
A long-dead family haunts a ramshackle cottage, the new home of grieving Mary and Graham Coles. Despite the dark presences, Mary is drawn to the house. Far away from London, the cottage offers her a refuge from well-meaning friends and unexpected reminders of her recently deceased daughters. (We don't find out what happened to those daughters until well into the book.) Graham hopes the move will pull Mary out of her numb despair. Ghostly steps creak, doors slam, and a strange red-haired young man appears outside one moment only to disappear the next. Rather than being alarmed, Mary welcomes the hauntings. Myerson intertwines Mary's further descent into grief with the tale of the family who inhabited the cottage 150 years earlier. After a violent storm, they found a red-haired young man beneath a massive tree uprooted in the yard. Thirteen-year-old Eliza immediately distrusts him, but her six younger siblings soon adore the mysterious James Dix. Four-year-old Lottie has her doubts, but then Lottie also believes she was once a dog; that she was once dead; that a woman named Merricales, wearing trousers, haunts the kitchen; that Merricales is mourning the horrible deaths of her two daughters. A poisonous creature, indeed, James nonetheless worms his way into Eliza's heart, with devastating consequences. More than a century later, Mary finds herself the object of her neighbor Eddie's attentions. Eddie, very solicitous and rather married, is eager to talk about Mary's girls, which is a relief to Mary but a betrayal as far as Graham is concerned. Myerson (The Quickening, 2013, etc.) twines a delightfully twisted tale, exposing the dark underbelly of love and the gaping, raw wounds of grief. She deftly holds back secrets, doling them out carefully, as if the reader, too, can only face so much horror at a time. By turns terrifying and heartbreaking; an enthralling spine-chiller.

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Starred review from February 15, 2016
On the first page, it's clear that something indescribably horrific has happened in the past. In the present, Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, are buying a farmhouse, trying to escape the grief of a loss so tragic that Mary describes it as having stopped her heart. The narrative moves seamlessly from past to present in the same location in the English countryside; narrating the sections in the past is 13-year-old Eliza, oldest of eight children, who tells of the arrival of city man James Dix, found under an oak tree felled in a storm, who stays to work on her family's farm and to woo her. Both Mary and Eliza's sister, four-year-old Lottie (who blurts out events in the past and future that stun her family), are attuned to the supernatural and experience sightings between the two time periods, as their full stories are gradually revealed. Myerson has become known for her skill as a teller of particularly dreadful stories, but never before has she so vividly limned the pain felt by so many of her well-drawn characters. Despite its length, this novel is impossible to put down; it will be read compulsively to learn the what of what has happened, if not the why. A stunner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)