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She was educated at Dollar Academy in Scotland and at Cranleigh School, Surrey, and Oriel College, Oxford. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home - a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. Striking up a friendship with her landlord, Grant, and his younger sister, Cass, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. And as autumn turns to winter, and a heavy snowfall traps the inhabitants of the estate within its walls, tensions rise to fever pitch. Too late, I recalled myself,” she tells the increasingly sceptical reader. “A reaction, of course, was what she wanted, what they always wanted.”
But among the tiny roads, dykes and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad. Striking up a friendship with her landlord, Grant, and his younger sister, Cass, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. Hinchcliffe writes atmospherically . . . Fans of the supernatural will find much to enjoy in this eerie tale * Literary Review * There are also some good ideas in here, but sadly I feel like they didn't amount to much. The narrator is not particularly likeable, and none of the other characters is either. They are just a bit flat and a bit sad and a bit uninteresting. I was willing to endure a certain amount of ambiguity in the hopes of seeing how everything came together at the end, but it just didn’t? When you finally find out why the narrator lost her job, the event itself and the investigation after were so improbable that I just don’t believe it would ever happen that way, even in fiction. There’s no explanation for the mysterious happenings and the book is so heavy-handed with the overall “takeaway” at the end. Not really sure what to make of this one and it seems a few other people have voiced the same opinion. I did listen to this as an audiobook and I think the narrator did a great job which helped to make this more engaging than it mightOverall, Hare House is an engaging read with elements of the Gothic and folk horror woven subtly throughout. Born in London in 1969, I grew up all over the world as my father served the Foreign Office in New York, Kuwait, Tanzania, Dubai, Zambia and Jordan. This is one of those books I find difficult to rate, I raced through it but at the same time I don’t think I really enjoyed it. The experience reminded me a little of reading things like Gone Girl I just got caught up in wanting to know what was going on, even though I wasn’t expecting a satisfying denouement. Although it’s well-crafted in terms of prose style, atmospheric, and Sally Hinchcliffe’s highly effective at establishing a sense of place, the issues I had were with the story/plot and the portrayal of certain characters. The novel’s set in a remote area of rural Scotland where a rather enigmatic woman has retreated, after an unspecified incident ended her teaching career. She relates her experiences solely from her own perspective and gives every appearance of being an unreliable narrator. It’s difficult to go into too many details without spoilers but this falls somewhere between psychological and supernatural mystery – with a nod towards folk horror. The narrator becomes embroiled in a series of unsettling events related to the local community: hints of witchcraft, mysterious animal deaths, and disturbing effigies abound. However, it’s unclear what’s real and what’s imagined. Eerie and subtle . . . This deliciously chilly tale dodges the expected outcome and maintains a delicate balance between psychology and witchcraft right to its disturbing end * Guardian * I’m thrilled to see Hare House chosen as Scottish Book of the Month and I hope it encourages more people to come and see the region for themselves.
There was nothing there, I thought. Nothing but the shadows of the trees, my own imagination. It was only when it moved that I could make it out, the silent hare, turning and loping away into the dark. So the positives first- it's decently written and the prose helps the story flow. Hinchcliffe isn't too flowery and keeps it moving. And the language! The writing! Crisp as fresh snow, sharp as broken glass, not a sentence wasted, not a word out of place. The prose was lovely and there were a few times that I'd pause to think over the choice of words and digest them. Very poetic and descriptive which, again, really came to life through the narrator. Sally Hinchcliffe’s Hare House is a modern-day witch story, perfect for fans of Pine and The Loney .
WORLD BUILDING, ATMOSPHERE AND SETTING
In the first brisk days of autumn, a woman arrives in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home - a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. But among the tiny roads, dykes and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad. In the first brisk days of autumn, a woman arrives in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home – a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. But among the tiny roads, dykes and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad. I also didn’t connect with the main character, which meant that the stakes weren’t that high, and I didn’t love the ending. Since 1994 I have worked for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the IT department, developing databases to support its scientific work. In 2001 I took a two year sabbatical from Kew to work in Eswatini (then Swaziland) as a volunteer with Skillshare International. Sally Hinchcliffe’s Hare House is a modern-day witch story, perfect for fans of Pine and The Loney.
We have an unnamed narrator; a woman whose teaching career came to an end after a seemingly innocuous incident involving her A-Level students. To retreat/escape/start again, she decides to take refuge within a remote Scottish town. She rents a cottage from Grant, but also manages to ingratiate herself into the family's inner circle, becoming something akin to a friend or confidante to both Grant and his much younger, teenage sister, Cass. The family have suffered tragedies, but as our narrator spends more time there, she discovers that there are rumours and whisperings between the locals, suggestions of witches. The story is good. It's well paced and just spooky enough. I would have liked to gather more of a connection to our narrator, who we never learned the name of. Hare House is hiding something sinister and damned and as winter slowly starts to tighten its hold it brings with it more than just snow which soon blankets everything it touches in a muffled silence and the dark, twisted history of madness, grief and loss begins to emerge all around to once again haunt those who still dwell on these grounds. A beautiful, slow burn of a novel, eerie and shimmering in equal measure. The bewitching prose brilliantly evokes the bleak glories of a remote Scottish landscape, while the subtle shifts of plot and perspective lure the reader towards an unsettling denouement where nothing is quite what it seems. A dark uncanny read and all the more satisfying for that -- Mary Paulson-Ellis, author of The Other Mrs Walker and Emily Noble's DisgraceNot really sure what to make of this one and it seems a few other people have voiced the same opinion. I did listen to this as an audiobook and I think the narrator did a great job which helped to make this more engaging than it might have been otherwise. In the first brisk days of autumn, a woman arrives in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home. But among the tiny roads, wild moorland, and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad.
Sally Hinchcliffe's Hare House is a modern-day witch story, perfect for fans of Pine and The Loney. In her second novel, Byrne braids together three storylines, each set a thousand years apart. The final days of 1012 are depicted through the experiences of three royal siblings in the early post-classical Mayan era; in December 2012, Leah, a 19-year-old mixed race American, makes the journey of a lifetime to Belize; and in 3012, as the last of the icecaps disappear, the end of the diluvian age is celebrated all over the world. The entire population has been reduced to around 8 million, most of whom are always on the move and own no more than they can carry. A way of life forced on climate refugees has become the guiding philosophy of near-universal religion LaViaja, credited to Saint Leah, believed to have been the first person to reach Xibalba, the mystical world beyond this one. This is an incredibly ambitious and thought-provoking work. The main character was untrustworthy and didn’t seem like the right narrator for this story. Her, and the rest of the characters were, for me, a little too predictable, too much like cookie-cutter characters. I didn’t find the story as tense or as thrilling or as spooky as I thought it would be, and I felt it was almost a bit too timid and conservative for me. Through the narrative, we learn what had happened in London: our narrator’s class of girls fainting and falling unconscious together, which was mysterious and unsettling enough and which resulted in something of a witchhunt where our narrator was scapegoated and left under a cloud. An effort to protect the school’s reputation, perhaps, but is there smoke without fire?A modern day witch story penned by Dunscore-based author Sally Hinchcliffe has been chosen as Waterstones’ October book of the month for Scotland. Two and a half stars because at least it kept me reading till the end, but I can’t say I really enjoyed this book. It was billed as a modern gothic novel about an unnamed British woman who rents a cottage in Scotland after a mysterious incident causes her to lose her longtime teaching job. She meets the family who owns the grounds and shortly after her arrival, strange things start happening at the cottage and the main estate house. As the story goes on, you learn more about what made the woman lose her job as well as the mysterious past of the people who own the property. Sounds promising, right? As we learn that our nameless narrator has fled London and her previous job at a private girls’ school in mysterious circumstances, we begin to wonder what made her sixth-form class of fresh, young girls fall down “like petals from a rose”. Who was the victim of this mass fainting? The seasoned teacher grown bitter as love turned sour, or the smirking teenage girl with a “high, light silver” laugh?
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