The House on Vesper Sands

'The most vivid and compelling portrait of late Victorian London since THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE' Sarah Perry

'Part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle' Guardian

'Has everything you could want in a novel' Stylist

In Victorian London, poor women are vanishing, and rumours abound of a shadowy gang known as the Spiriters.

In the unfamiliar streets of Soho, Gideon Bliss sets out in search of his lost love. From a ledge above Mayfair a seamstress jumps to her death, a mysterious message stitched into her own skin. Nearby, her aristocratic employer makes an abrupt exit from a gala ball, with society columnist Octavia Hillingdon in pursuit.

And on the sullen Kent shore, as the darkness gathers, secrets lie hidden at the house on Vesper Sands.

“The most vivid and compelling portrait of late Victorian London since The Crimson Petal and the White”

Rarely does a writer stop you so fully in your tracks - Sunday Independent on THE MAKER OF SWANS

A gloriously unorthodox confection, part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle, with a generous handful of police procedural and a splash of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm. Both disquietingly eerie and impossible to read without laughing out loud ... A cracking good read. - Guardian

Like George Eliot, Paraic O'Donnell takes the bombastic and the sincere and throws them together for comic contrast; like Dickens, he does it in deliciously dark Victorian style. The House on Vesper Sands is an eerie, raucous novel, packed with pathos and wit. Read it!

The prose in O'Donnell's first novel is glorious, combining an ear for deep cadences of language with a phenomenal acuity of vision ... O'Donnell is clearly a major talent - GUARDIAN on THE MAKER OF SWANS

Truly bewitching - David Mitchell on THE MAKER OF SWANS

A page-turner in the very best sense of the term ... a deeply pleasurable gothic fantasy - Financial Times on THE MAKER OF SWANS

Lavishly entertaining, strange and captivating - INDEPENDENT on THE MAKER OF SWANS

Enthralling ... a literary feast - Stylist on THE MAKER OF SWANS

Paraic O'Donnell is a writer of fiction, poetry and criticism. His first novel, THE MAKER OF SWANS, was named the Amazon Rising Stars Debut of the Month for February 2016 and was shortlisted for the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards in the Newcomer of the Year category. He lives in Wicklow, Ireland with his wife and two children.

| @paraicodonnell

'The most vivid and compelling portrait of late Victorian London since THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE ' Sarah Perry 'Part Wilkie Collins, part Conan Doyle' Guardian 'Has everything you could want in a novel' Stylist In Victorian London, poor women are vanishing, and rumours abound of a shadowy gang known as the Spiriters. In the unfamiliar streets of Soho, Gideon Bliss sets out in search of his lost love. From a ledge above Mayfair a seamstress jumps to her death, a mysterious message stitched into her own skin. Nearby, her aristocratic employer makes an abrupt exit from a gala ball, with society columnist Octavia Hillingdon in pursuit.And on the sullen Kent shore, as the darkness gathers, secrets lie hidden at the house on Vesper Sands.

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