 First edition | |
| Author | Kate Mosse |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Brian Gallagher |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Orion |
Publication date | Oct 2009 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 272 |
| ISBN | 1-4091-1227-6 |
The Winter Ghosts is a 2009 historical fiction novel by English author Kate Mosse based on The Cave, a novella she wrote earlier that year as part of the Quick Reads initiative. [1]
In 1933 Toulouse, Freddie Watson takes a letter written in medieval Occitan to an antiquarian bookseller for translation. Questioned by the proprietor Freddie tells how, five years earlier in 1928 at the age of 27 he had travelled by car to Ariège ostensibly to help recover from a bout of influenza, but also to try and shake off the grief of his brother George's death as a member of the Royal Sussex Regiment in the Battle of the Boar's Head.
On a cold winter morning he drives south from Tarascon-sur-Ariège towards Vicdessos but he gets lost, and then caught in a blizzard drives off the road. He is uninjured but the car is damaged and he sets off on foot through the woods and eventually reaches a village where he finds a boarding house. He is told that that night is the annual feast and he is invited to attend, where he meets the captivating Fabrissa and spend the night 'talking of love and loss and war', both his own and also those of the village itself which some 700 years earlier had its Cathar faith destroyed by the Catholic church.
But next morning Fabrissa is gone...
In an afterword to the 2010 Orion paperback edition the author explains that 'four specific inspirations or themes underpin the narrative pace and characterization:
In conclusion the author describes how she has written both a love-story and a ghost story.
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