The Golden Key

“Spiritualism, the suffragette movement, and the fairy tales of Lewis Carroll” combine in this eerie Gothic mystery that will “captivate fans of historical fiction” (Booklist).   Helena Walton-Cisneros is called to solve a decades-old cold case in the Fens of Norfolk—an age-old ‘fairyland’ of folklore, dark magic, and missing children . . .1901. After the death of Queen Victoria, England heaves with the uncanny. Séances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms. Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for her ability to find the lost and the displaced, is hired by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens. But the Fens are an age-old land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. The locals speak of devilmen and catatonic children are found on the Broads. Here, Helena finds what she was sent for, as the Fenland always gives up its secrets, in the end.

Booklist

“Spiritualism, the suffragette movement, and the fairy tales of Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald combine with the author’s lyrical writing style to convey an elegant sense of mystery and otherworldliness. This gothic fantasy will captive fans of historical fiction.”

Foreword Reviews

“Amid the phantasmagorical developments of Marian Womack’s The Golden Key, which include spiritualism, changelings, and cracked doors between worlds, a parable against privilege arises.”

BookPage

“Steeped in a slew of influences, The Golden Key bends genres . . . It’s part Shirley Jackson’s stories of inner demons, part Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . . . part Astrid Lindgren’s faith in children’s resilience and part ghost story . . . Enter a mysterious world in the hands of capable women. Getting drawn into this story is easy; getting out again is trickier.”

Tim Major, author of Snakeskins

“With hints of the brooding Gothic of Rawblood and Rebecca, this wonderfully creepy historical novel makes it absolutely clear that Marian Womack is a rising star.”

Alison Littlewood, author of A Cold Season

“An intriguing and unsettling tale of séances, strange lights, disappearing children and a poacher who swears he has seen the devil in the marshes . . . Womack brings a great sense of the uncanny to the Fens.”

Tor.com

“ . . . ultimately a very literary kind of historical mystery, reminiscent in places of works like Jeanette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sky and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula.”

New York Journal of Books

“Discover a brooding and eerie gothic tale of a wonderland filled with something other than wonder, and a fairyland that is dark and dangerous.”

About the Author

Marian Womack, author of The Golden Key and The Swimmers, was born in Andalusia and educated in the UK. Her debut short story collection, Lost Objects (Luna Press, 2018) was shortlisted for two BSFA awards and one BFA award. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and she holds degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities. She writes at the intersection between weird and gothic fiction, and her stories normally deal with strange landscapes, ghostly encounters, or uncanny transformations. Marian lives in Cambridge, at the edge of the Fens, with her husband, their children and two aging Spanish cats. When she is not writing she can be found working as an academic librarian, or editing books and pamphlets in her indie publishing project, Calque Press.

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