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The Daylight Gate
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  • Published: 16 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448124701
  • Imprint: RH AudioGo
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 3 hr 59 min
  • Narrator: Sian Thomas

The Daylight Gate

Formats & editions
EBook
16 Aug 2012
Audiobook
16 Aug 2012
Paperback
15 Dec 2020
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This is Lancashire. This is Pendle. This is witch country. A tale of magic, superstition, conscience and ruthless murder, by one of the UK's most acclaimed literary writers.

GOOD FRIDAY, 1612. Pendle Hill, Lancashire.

A mysterious gathering of thirteen people is interrupted by local magistrate, Roger Nowell.

Is this a witches' Sabbat?

Two notorious Lancashire witches are already in Lancaster Castle waiting trial. Why is the beautiful and wealthy Alice Nutter defending them? And why is she among the group of thirteen on Pendle Hill?

Elsewhere, a starved, abused child lurks. And a Jesuit priest and former Gunpowder plotter, recently returned from France, is widely rumoured to be heading for Lancashire. But who will offer him sanctuary? And how quickly can he be caught?

This is the reign of James I, a Protestant King with an obsession: to rid his realm of twin evils, witchcraft and Catholicism, at any price ...
  • Published: 16 August 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448124701
  • Imprint: RH AudioGo
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 3 hr 59 min
  • Narrator: Sian Thomas
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About the author

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.
portrait photo of Jeanette Winterson

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Praise for The Daylight Gate

If you like her other novels, you will adore this. She has done her homework... the beauty of the writing, exemplary in its pared-down simplicity. It’s so seductive that by the middle I was hooked.

Independent

It is also one of the lead titles in the launch of Hammer books, and boy have they hit the ground at a most appropriate run. While it doesn't seem to be the typical Jeanette Winterson novel, it does feature religious intolerance and lesbian sex, and neither are new to her oeuvre. Nor is a northern setting, nor a look at the bending of truth and fantasy, and the wish-fulfilment of those wanting more. So this is not just a case of an author following a commission, but it almost seems to be, so brilliantly has Winterson followed the Hammer tradition. Here are black masses, dark spells, heaving bosoms and evil not as some tremendous CGI effect, but starting from something as base as bigotry. Only the fact the characters seem like real people and not stereotypical yokels stops this from creating that lost Hammer classic in the reader's mind.

The Bookbag