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Drenched in sinister rural gothic, Francine Toon’s eerie debut makes superbly unsettling use of the Scottish highlands to infuse the continuing aftershocks of a decade-old mystery with slowly encroaching dread.
Winner of the McIlvanney Prize 2020
They are driving home from the search party when they see her. The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men. Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she's gone.
In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren's mother a decade ago. Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father's turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it's no longer clear who she can trust.
In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophobia. In a place that can feel like the edge of the word, she unites the chill of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times.
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 9780857526700
Number of pages: 336
Weight: 453 g
Dimensions: 222 x 144 x 32 mm
Ghostly, atmospheric and bewitching, Pine is an unsettling and beautifully written debut. The plot almost feels secondary to the rich, original, nuanced, disjointed prose that haunts you, giving you chills as you... More
This is a hyper atmospheric slow-burn thriller set in a rural Scottish highlands community. The disappearance of Christine, mother to Lauren, devastates Lauren and her father Niall. He turns to drink, she turns to... More
I nabbed a free copy of this from the staff room and I'm so glad I did.
I read Pine in a couple of days as I just could not put it down. This wonderfully atmospheric thriller has so much more to it than just a...
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