Midwinterblood

By: Marcus Sedgwick

Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt

Have you ever had the feeling that you've lived another life? Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar even when you've never been there before, or felt that you've known someone even though you are meeting them for the first time?

In a novel comprising seven parts each of them influenced by a moon - flower moon, harvest moon, hunter's moon, blood moon - and travelling from 2073 back in time to the dark of the moon and the days of Viking saga, this is the story of Eric and Merle who have loved and lost one another and who have been searching for each other ever since. In the different stories the two appear as lovers, mother and son, brother and sister, artist and child as they come close to finding each other before facing the ultimate sacrifice.

Beautifully imagined, intricately and cleverly structured this is a heart-wrenching and breathtaking love story, but it also has the hallmark Sedgwick gothic touch with plenty of blood-spilling, a vampire and sacrifice.

Read by Julian Rhind-Tutt

(P)2004 Orion Publishing Group.Ltd©2011 Marcus Sedgwick

Critic reviews

Midwinterblood contains much that is riveting, strange and darkly enchanting. I read it in a single feverish sitting, late one evening, and drifted to sleep haunted by its vision of love and fate and history.

It is something of a cliché for a reviewer to claim he devoured a book in a single sitting, and I have to admit that is not the case here. I began "Midwinterblood" late one evening in bed, dreamed about it through the night and finished it early the next morning.

The Time Traveler's Wife meets Lost in this chilling exploration of love and memory.

This is a novel that demands to be read more than once because it is only at the conclusion of the seven interlinked episodic stories that the complexity of the novel's extraordinary story of doomed love becomes clear... Sedgwick is a fine writer and this hugely atmospheric and demanding book will satisfy adults too.