The Girl from Rawblood

A Novel

By: Catriona Ward

Narrated by: Liz Pearce, Steven Crossley, John Keating, Eizabeth Sastre, Jenny Sterlin

In 1910, 11-year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris knows it's because of a congenital disease that means she must be strictly isolated. Papa told her so.

Forbidden to speak to other children or the servants, denied her one friend, Iris grows up in solitude. But she reads books. And one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother's grave, she forces the truth from her father. The disease is biologically impossible. A lie to cover a darker secret. The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. Her origins are a mystery, but her purpose is clear. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child - she comes, and death follows. Iris makes her father a promise: to remain alone all her life. But when she's 15, she breaks it. The consequences of her choice are immediate and horrific. Iris' story is interwoven with the past, the voices of the dead - Villarcas, taken by her.

Iris' grandmother sets sail from Dover to Italy with a hired companion, to spend her final years in the sun before consumption takes her. Instead she meets betrayal and a fate worse than death. Iris' father, his medical career in ruins, conducts unconscionable experiments to discover how she travels in the Villarca blood. Iris' mother, pregnant, walks the halls of Rawblood whispering to her, coaxing her to come. As the narratives converge, Iris seeks her out in a confrontation that shatters her past and her reality, revealing the chasm in Iris' own fractured identity. Who is she? What does she desire? The answer is more terrible and stranger than Iris could have imagined.

©2015, 2017 Catriona Ward (P)2017 Recorded Books

I am in awe

This author is on fire. I started this book on a whim since I loved the last I read. The House on Needless Street.
I like the last book WILL listen to this again.
The book is poetic.
A ghostly love story about time and lack of time. How all is inevitable. It was tragic, poetic, well researched for the era and written with beautiful words that I’d me seeing the whole book in my minds eye.

I have a new favorite author!!!

more of a physical read

performance was good but I found myself lost keeping up with the different perspective and what was going on when. I think I would of enjoyed it more if I had read it so I can see conversation breaks and etc. def an interesting story.

creepy and weird

gothic creepy horror and well done.excellent narration.be prepared to jump around in time and characters.

Wow

I’ll read anything by Catriona Ward, and I was overall quite impressed knowing that this was her debut novel, an epic gothic horror.
I found it kind of difficult to get through, but not for the reasons that many reviewers have cited - the nonlinear chronology was not hard to follow at all because each chapter literally starts by stating the year and the character narrating. The audiobook also helps differentiate the perspectives further with different readers.
I’m just feeling a little confused about what happened and will be reflecting on this book for a long while, which is exactly how I leave every one of Ward’s books.

hard to follow at times but a good listen.

it was kind of all over the place, especially if you aren't able to sit and completely focus on the book. but a good listen non the less. don't know that I'd do a repeat listen though