He tries not to look down at where the dead hand trails across the slush and ice, like the fingers of a child, balling snow and ready to hurl. They carry the heavy parcel over the sea-ice, back to land. Slowly, a dark shape emerges and flops out onto the ice. The other two men hold him as he starts to heave the body from out of the water. The book opens with a body being dragged out of the sea ice, and it sets the atmosphere for the rest of the novel: About two-thirds of the way through the book, The Glass Woman shifts from a traditional Gothic to something more like historical fiction, and I found that once all the mysteries were revealed, I was no longer as engaged in the story. It’s wonderfully atmospheric and creepy…at least at first. It’s about the dangers of rumors, and how they can poison a community. The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea is billed a Gothic mystery set in 1686 in Iceland that has shades of Jane Eyre to it. TW: This book contains the graphic depiction of a rape. The wind whirls it into emptiness.īut there is such heat while it burns … And the light is infinite.Genre: Historical: Other, Mystery/Thriller It leaves only dead ash and dry dust behind. In some hearts, that fire is greedy and becomes a devouring inferno. In every human heart glows a tiny flame of hope that tomorrow will bring a love that might satisfy the smouldering yearning to be known. Only ever minutes old, they dissolve with a passing cloud, or a gust of wind. If we were ever found, our bodies would be dragged from the rubble together: tangled, knotted – inseparable.īut such moments of savage contentment are as fleeting as the reflection of the swelling moon blinking upon the surface of the sea. And in those heat-soaked rags of time, I wished for every mountain in Iceland to shudder down rocks upon us, concealing us for ever from the gaze of the world. In those last moments of wakefulness, blinking up at the stars, as I sensed Pétur’s sweat cooling on my skin, I felt utterly human and fallen, and utterly content. God might strike me down, but I felt saved and whole. I did not simply hold Pétur in my arms I embraced him with blood and bone, clasped him with muscle and spirit, everything that I was and hoped to be. Tiny moments of golden brilliance, gossamer-thin and stretched to breaking, in a life otherwise steeped in grim shadow. Then, in the darkness, the world and everything in it became as skinless as water, no boundaries to show where one wave ended and the next began, our bodies like paired oars, each movement driving us further into the unknown. “Sometimes we woke in the night, huddled against the cold.
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