Ghosts at Cockcrow — June Barraclough

Holding her mare, her riding crop in her hand, Claris Fearnley looks pensively over the hills to the chimneys of her home, Foxglove Hall, which nestles among the distant trees. It is a warm summer morning in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the year 1734 and Claris, a woman in her late twenties, is reflecting on her life as an unmarried scholarly recluse. It suited her, she thought, as she rode back through her estates but ... could there be something else in her nature left unsatisfied? Ghosts at Cockrow is a historical novel of remarkable authenticity and vitality by an established and accomplised writer. Against a background of eighteenth-century themes - religious conflict, scientific discovery, witchcraft, early "feminism" - the author sets the lives and loves of Claris Fearnley and the society of the real-life place of Eastcliff. Sensitively powerfully yet economically expressed, here indeed is a novel that truly conveys "the poetry of history"