Stay updated with breaking news from Trilling heart. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
(Black Swan, £8.99) In 1871 Massachusetts, utopianist Samuel Hood sets up the School for the Trilling Heart, a progressive institution intended to produce educated, independently-minded women. His daughter, Caroline, is one of the school’s two teachers, and she lives in fear that she will manifest signs of the disease that killed her mother, fear heightened by the appearance of red birds previously seen at her mother’s death. Almost immediately, Hood’s ideals are compromised when the reality of free-thinking girls collides with his paternalistic vision. The pupils start to come down with a mysterious ailment, which his doctor friend diagnoses as hysteria and treats with methods which nowadays will be seen as shockingly invasive. Beams’s highly readable but unsettling debut novel has a 19th-century elegance and Gothic tone attuned perfectly to its themes of shadows from the past, omens, men’s control over women’s bodies and the hint of a malign force just beyon ....