Frances Hardinge’s 2015 novel The Lie Tree became the first children’s book to win the Costa book of the year award since Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, introducing her distinctive voice to a new audience. Hardinge’s latest book is a deliciously strange and uncompromising mystery set in the English civil war. Makepeace is an illegitimate daughter of the aristocratic Fellmotte family and shares their supernatural hereditary gift: the capacity to be possessed by ghosts. Unbeknown to them, the wild, brutish spirit of a bear already resides in Makepeace, and may be her only defence against the Fellmottes’ terrible plans for her. She escapes into a countryside divided by war in a complex tangle of plots, spies and intrigue.
Spiky and curious, resourceful and brave, Makepeace is a typically unique Hardinge heroine who finds strength in the very things that make her different. She may only be 12 years old when the novel begins but, as with The Lie Tree, this won’t stop adult readers from finding much to savour in the rich, sophisticated prose that bristles with menace and the unexpected. The story is at its best behind the oppressive walls of ancestral home Grizehayes and in the bewitching synergy between girl and bear. The pace flags a little as Makepeace and her strange jumble of ghosts traverse the war-ridden land, but this is really the most minor of gripes; Hardinge’s tale of ghosts, puritans and shaping your own destiny is an unmissable, hypnotic treat.
• A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge is published by Macmillan (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
