Pine
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Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Pine
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Cathleen McCarron
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By:
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Francine Toon
About this listen
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 whom 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.
©2019 Francine Toon (P)2019 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"It's both eerie and thrilling at once, and had me under its spell until the end." (Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure)
Where other books would have ramped up the drama, here there are measured responses and a quiet acceptance.
At times this is quite frustrating until you sink into the meandering story with its beautifully poetic turns of phrase.
The narration is faultless and helps lull you into a dreamlike state.
It’s quietly bewitching but if I have any criticism is that I would’ve liked more emphasis on Lauren coming of age, more focus on the ramshackle house, and clarity about the recurring smells. But it’s a great read.
Quietly bewitching
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Engaging narrator.
Highly recommend
Excellent
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The first half of the novel is set up so meticulously, the details of the forest and of Lauren and Niall's decrepit house, the girls at school who pull her hair for being different and the strange sightings of a woman who went missing nearly 10 years ago, Lauren's mum.
The last portion of the novel felt a little rushed as a result of how thoroughly the first half was formed and written. It doesn't take away from the overall effect of the story however, and I have no doubt that the eerie images of derelict houses in the deep of the forest, women walking out into the road from the treeline, caught in headlights, will be with me for weeks to come.
A world of thick trees and small town folklore
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CREEPY.
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Good beginning & end, slow middle
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