How hauntingly beautiful is the cover of The Nesting, the new novel from acclaimed, award winning novelist C.J. Cooke. And you know what, the compelling story within the cover is just as haunting.
Full of Norwegian folklore and written in such a bewitching style, The Nesting portrays an eerie and unsettling charm that you can’t stop reading. The evocative language used throughout the story beautifully depicts the remote, menacing beauty of the Nordic landscape as well as powerfully enhancing the chilling atmosphere.
This is the ideal lockdown read with the cold, dark nights drawing in. I just recommend that you keep the lights on as you read.
Full of unreliable characters, this is a book that brilliantly keeps you guessing as you never quite know who to trust. But the portrayal of these characters is so vivid and so seductive.
The Nesting is beautifully original for so many reasons. Symbolically using ancient folklore, it skillfully explores the modern day issue of man’s impact on nature. It also respectfully explores mental health.
Published in hardback on 15th October 2020, I loved The Nesting and I’m sure you will too. It is sure to chill you and stir your senses. Here’s the opening prologue to give you a taste of this rich, ghostly tale.
Aurelia sprints through the dark forest, her white nightdress billowing like a cloud, her strides long and swift across the carpet of bark and brambles. She tries not to think too much about how the towering silver birches resemble skeletons, moonlight transforming the silvery trunks into endless prison bars and the weeping sky soaking her to the bone.
Her breaths come in quick, frantic gasps, her lungs ache and her feet bleed, but he is tearing after her and he will do much, much worse to her than the forest, or the thing in the house. He will hurt the babies, Gaia and Coco, and she will do absolutely anything to protect them. She has to draw him away from them, as far as she can. For good, this time.
So she powers downhill, her heart trying to climb into her mouth and her mind churning like a river wheel, though she knows there is no way she can outrun him for long, and there is no one to call in the wilderness that spreads for miles on end all around.
She takes the trail towards the cliff where a drop of two hundred feet connects the south end of a sapphire fjord to muscular granite. Her mind splits into two voices, one that tells her yes, this is the only way, the only option, and the other that shouts at her to turn back, it’s crazy, utterly crazy.
She reaches the cliff edge sooner than she’d anticipated. Her toes feel the rush of icy air at the end of the path and she has to wrap her arms around an oak tree to stop herself from tumbling off the end.
She can hear the thud of his feet fifty feet behind. She has only seconds to decide. The risk is enormous. It isn’t the thought of dying that brings a sob to her throat. It’s the girls. Gaia and Coco. Growing up without her.
She sees them in her mind, two bright angels. Even when she feels him grow closer she holds on to that vision and imagines reaching out to them, taking their hands.
Come on, Mumma! Hold on tight!
With a snarl he lunges at her, and quickly she darts out of his way, letting him plunge headlong towards the edge of the cliff where there is nothing but night separating rock and water, life and certain death.
But his shoulder collides with hers, and although she reaches out to take her daughters’ hands, her feet lift and she falls down, down into the endless dark.
I’m sure you’ll agree that the passage above is such a captivating opening to a novel that lures you in.
Thank you Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for inviting me to be involved in the blog tour of this atmospheric, spellbinding novel. It is the ideal read as we approach Halloween.
To read the book reviews from my fellow book bloggers also on the tour, please see below.
Happy reading everyone! 🙂
Thanks for the blog tour support Kirsty x