This is a truly atmospheric novel and as soon as I started reading it, I just couldn’t put it down.Escaping a recent personal tragedy, librarian Anne Adam longs for solitude and decides to take up a post on the remote island of Craigsea Rock to catalogue a huge private book collection owned by the mysterious Lucien Broussard. On arriving, Anne is mesmerised both by the beauty of Winterbourne and the island itself, not to mention the magnificent library with its many signed first editions. However, it isn’t long before Anne is questioning whether everything is truly as it seems. Without any internet or phone signal and a darkness at night like she’s never known, she feels completely cut off from the world. Is it just the weeks of this isolation that is causing her mind to play tricks or is there more to Winterbourne than Anne is led to believe? When she discovers a clue left by the person who started cataloguing the collection before her, Anne makes a shocking discovery.I raced through this book and loved it so much that even before I finished it, I bought and gifted a copy of it to a friend - a brave thing to do when you don’t know the ending yet. If you enjoy a novel with a haunting, gothic feel then this one is for you!

A fantastic book that kept me on the edge of my seat and I read this story in two days. I needed to find out what would happen. Winterbourne has all the elements I love in a story such as mystery, suspense, and an old house with secrets to solve. Also, I enjoyed the connection with books. I was immediately fascinated by the events that forced the main character to make a drastic change to her life. When Anne Adams found a job on an isolated island as a librarian, I thought it was the perfect solution being able to catalogue an enormous collection of books, but nothing could be further from the truth. The secondary characters were strange, and I was constantly wondering if they were dangerous too. Anne has a series of misadventures throughout the book which kept me guessing. I liked the gothic element of this book with included the usual tropes that accompany this genre. I found the ending unsettling, but I am sure others would not. Thank you to Net Galley and the Publisher for allowing me to read an advanced copy.

I loved reading this book. I rolled my eyes at several points. Anne is a great protagonist, but she has been through a lot in life which sometimes makes her point of view quite exhausting, and I found myself being exasperated by her. But Winterbourne, the place that she moves to to get away from her life, is absolutely enchanting at first, and then haunting. The best way to summarise this book is a modern, twisted Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is one of my favourite books so this was a great read for me. I did have to stop reading it at night though because it got a bit scary, but I'm a wimp who watches horror films through her fingers. Some of the characterisations didn't feel very believable, and the ending felt quite swift. The point at which I expected to be the ending wasn't the ending, and then when the ending happened it felt abrupt. But I was glued to the book until the very end. This novel is beautifully written and I enjoyed almost every minute of it. Definitely a book I'd re-read and buy for friends.

This was a bit of an unexpected wild ride! I was expecting a bit of Jane Eyre / Rebecca vibes, which it does give, but it also veers in quite a different direction too. It was a bit bonkers towards the end in the best way! We follow librarian Anne as she recovers from a tragic car accident and starts a new position cataloguing a private library at Winterbourne, a house on a remote Scottish island that is only inhabited by the owner part-time and the Coopers, which are a brother and sister who work for the owner as a housekeeper and sort of handyman. We find out that the previous librarian left the position under vaguely suspicious circumstances with a varying story depending on who Anne speaks to. Anne starts to investigate exactly what happened. The whole story is a bit ambiguous and we are kept guessing, never knowing if what Anne is seeing and experiencing is part of her grieving as the result of the car accident or whether it is reality. I personally love this type of element and it works really well in this story, especially with the slightly wild ending! The mix of classic gothic elements with horror (I won’t go into details as I don’t want to spoil it) worked well and gave a unique feel to the story. The characters were well developed and the Coopers were suitably spooky with Mrs Cooper giving Mrs Danvers from Rebecca vibes and Mr Cooper giving the heebie-jeebies in general. Add in a spooky sounding Cormorant that inhabits the island and seems to follow Anne, then the atmosphere was set. A surprising read and one I thoroughly enjoyed more than what I was expecting to!