Early days, but I think this a stunning novel to start 2024. It’s a horror novel that is scary where it needs to be scary, a romance novel where the romance tale several turns and where our hero finds happiness in a different way from the average romance and a book on feminine survival in the face of male violence.
In 19th century New York, Flora is rescued from a life of sexual violence and virtual slavery in Jordan’s tattoo parlour. Her benefactors are Chester and Minnie and she becomes a member of ‘polite’ society where her skills to read tarot are an amusement to those who are both rich and bored. But Flora also has the skills to raise the dead and that is something that is a powerful, double edged-weapon.
Emma Hinds is skilled at the grit, smoke and violence of both a resurgent New York and an industrial Manchester. She is also skilled at keeping the slow burning of question of whether the eponymous knowing is real or imagined. But this is a novel about escaping your past and becoming the purest version of yourself, scars and all. Readers of Sarah Waters will love it, but for me it’s the scariest thing I’ve read since Lauren Owen’s Small Angels. My thanks go to Bedford Square Publishers for the preview copy.
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