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The Well

The Well 1

by Catherine Chanter
Paperback
Publication Date: 11/03/2015
5/5 Rating 1 Review

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What if you might have committed a shocking act of violence?

What if that act of violence was the murder of your own grandchild?It hasn't rained in Britain for three years. Except at The Well, Ruth and Mark's rural property, their haven from the pressures of the city. But their lush garden paradise has made the outside world envious and suspicious, and the idyll soon turns sour.

Then Lucien arrives, the child to brighten their lives, and the sisters of the rose set up camp, drawn by the miracle of the rain.

And Ruth is swept inexorably towards her darkest nightmare.


Catherine Chanter's The Well is a haunting novel that probes the fragility of our personal relationships and the mystical connection between people and the places they call home.
ISBN:
9781922182685
9781922182685
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
11-03-2015
Publisher:
Text Publishing
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
400
Dimensions (mm):
234x153x30mm
Weight:
0.53kg
Catherine Chanter

Catherine Chanter was born and raised in the West Country. She has written for BBC Radio 4 and has had short stories and poetry published in a wide range of anthologies and publications. Chanter has a Masters, with distinction, in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University, and won the Yeovil Poetry Prize in 2010.

The Well, her debut novel, won the 2013 Lucy Cavendish Prize for Unpublished Fiction, was longlisted for the 2015 CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger, and was picked for the Richard and Judy Book Club. Besides being an author, Catherine has led education provision within the NHS for young people with significant mental health problems. She currently works for a charity which seeks to engage excluded and vulnerable children and teenagers in learning.

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“Elsewhere, people were squeezing the last six months into small spaces: bicycles onto the backs of campervans, mattresses onto the roofs of cars, sleeping bags into recycled supermarket carriers, saucepans stacked one into another like Russian dolls, inflatable water carriers deflated. Set to music it would have been a grand chorus scene in an opera, with all the crowd and the minor parts working in unison and it seemed as though any minute they would all turn to face front and burst into song for their curtain call.”

The Well is the first novel by British short story writer and poet, Catherine Chanter. Ruth Ardingly is returned, under house arrest, to The Well, the lush rural property she and her husband, Mark have owned for over a year. The property is securely fenced, Ruth wears an ankle bracelet monitor and is guarded by three soldiers enforcing the Drought Emergency Regulations Act. How has their escape from the City (and the cloud of suspicion that hung over Mark) in the guise of a tree change, gone so horribly wrong?

As Ruth endures the boredom of her sentence, she thinks back on how it all started: the purchase, the rain that favours their idyll, the satisfaction of working towards self-sufficiency and the delight in presence of their grandson, Lucien. Ruth shares some of the memories with a young guard and with the priest who visits her. She tells of the jealousy and suspicion of neighbours, and the arrival of the Sisters of the Rose of Jericho with their charismatic leader, Sister Amelia.

Against the background of a severely water-restricted England, Chanter examines how relationships can break down under the effect of suspicion and increasingly differing priorities, the influence of religious cults and the tragic consequences that can ensue. She gives the reader a glimpse of online religion and the mass hysteria it can generate. This is a gripping drama that will have the reader wondering about the true fate of the young victim, and Ruth’s part in it, until the final pages.

Chanter’s characters are both credible and complex. Her descriptive prose is wonderfully evocative: “.. the thought of her is dries my mouth with hope and fear and thoughts, wild and screeching as crows at dusk, scattering into the darkness” and “Some, I guess, came simply to dip their toe in the rippling pond of drama in the otherwise flat surface of their lives” are just two examples. This thought-provoking novel is a brilliant debut.

Contains Spoilers No
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