Carrion Crow: A gloriously gothic unfurling of one family’s festering secrets

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Marguerite Périgord is imprisoned in the attic of her family’s Chelsea house, high above the foul smelling Thames. Her days pass with a sewing machine, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and a carrion crow nesting in the rafters. Cut off from the world, she memorises domestic advice, studies her own changing body and longs for the life denied to her below.

Her mother, Cécile Périgord, believes the confinement is necessary. Marguerite’s engagement to an older, impoverished solicitor threatens the respectability Cécile has spent her life securing. She knows how precarious a woman’s position can be, and she will do anything to protect the family name.

Both women harbour secrets shaped by ambition, fear and survival. As isolation sharpens Marguerite’s anger, the boundaries between mind and body begin to dissolve. Cécile, blind to the consequences of her control, cannot see what her daughter is becoming.

This is a dark, unsettling novel about power, confinement and female rage, rich with gothic atmosphere and psychological intensity.