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A review by emilybh
How Pale the Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell
3.0
‘This world was constructed from objects and knick-knacks fallen from a flowing slipstream of time ... gathered on the shoreline of those tables.’
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This is a strange and unsettling book in which the narrator avoids confronting her father’s death in London by remaining in Strasbourg over the winter alone. She abandons her new job and instead researches the city and its ghosts, ‘seeking the stories of strangers and the past’. Scovell is an interesting writer, and although the novel is exactly the mix of history, place and identity that I love, and I enjoyed many passages, overall I found its tone and the lack of backstory given to its narrator dissatisfying.
.
This is a strange and unsettling book in which the narrator avoids confronting her father’s death in London by remaining in Strasbourg over the winter alone. She abandons her new job and instead researches the city and its ghosts, ‘seeking the stories of strangers and the past’. Scovell is an interesting writer, and although the novel is exactly the mix of history, place and identity that I love, and I enjoyed many passages, overall I found its tone and the lack of backstory given to its narrator dissatisfying.