CENTURY
By Sarah Singleton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
What It's About: Century is a house, the home of a pair of sisters, Mercy and Charity, their father and the household staff. Here it is always winter and each day passes in exactly the same way. The girls rise in the night and go to bed at dawn. They cannot remember it ever being different.
The book opens with a haunting. Mercy can see ghosts, but one day she sees one that has never appeared to her before - a woman floating beneath the ice in a pond. It scares her, not because it is a ghost, which she is used to, but because it means a change in her daily routine. It is a signal, perhaps, that something is wrong.
Mercy wakes one morning soon after to find a snowdrop on her pillow. She then meets a mysterious young man in the grounds of the house who tells her that her life is not what it seems. Slowly, it becomes clear that the family is caught in a web of secrets and lies, and Mercy must find a way to break free.
What I Liked About It: I was reminded of the film, The Others, in which there are also two children who live in a twilight world. Century is as creepy as that movie and it's not because there are shrieking banshees everywhere or bloody beheadings on every other page. The eerieness is conveyed in a much more subtle manner by the author who describes this nighttime world so well that I felt I was walking through the shadowy garden paths with Mercy, and could see the moonlight fall like silver on my path; and feel and taste the cold air.
There is also a sense of taut and silent tension, so extreme that it's you almost dare not breathe as you read about Mercy trailing after a ghostly child and stepping into another world which holds the key to all the secrets of her existence.
It's been a long time since a book scared me so. It's a feeling both horrid and delicious.
If You Like the Sound of this Book, You Should Also Try: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
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