Maud has lived an isolated existence in her childhood home since the tragedy and still doesn’t want to talk about it. Edmund spent many years in an asylum, painting demons, and has now died. No-one except Maud has ever known why he did it, and she has never spoken about it. One day he ran out of the house carrying a sharpened ice-pick and killed the first person he saw, and then went mad. The book starts in the ‘60s, when an elderly Maud is being pestered by a journalist to tell the story of the murder her father committed when she was young. But during the renovation of the local church, Edmund finds a medieval painting of the Last Judgement – the Wenhaston Doom – whitewashed over during the Reformation and he becomes obsessed with the demons portrayed on it. Edmund Stearne, her father, is searching for a book rumoured to have been written by a medieval mystic, the Book of Alice Pyett. Her strict and domineering father doesn’t have much love or time for any of his children, especially his daughter, and her mother is almost permanently pregnant, though most of those pregnancies don’t come to term. Young Maud Stearne is a lonely child, growing up in an old house in the midst of the Suffolk fens in the early 20th century. Medieval demons and Edwardian doom… 😀 😀 😀 😀
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