Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A man falls off a Devon cliff and his ghost comes back to haunt
The House at the Edge of the World
What you need to know before your trail
Morwenna and Corwin are twins. When they were eighteen, their father fell off a cliff and Morwenna still believes that this was a stupid way to die. Why did their father fall from the cliff? What happened?
Since then a ghost has come to take residence in the house and the house takes on a new and chilling atmosphere. Morwenna and Corwin leave to go their own separate ways and only their grandfather seems to find solace in the old crumbling house,spending his days painting the family’s story in to a large canvas map.
The house seems to be at the centre of this map for it draws the twins back home from their new lives in London and Africa but can they make peace with their past?
Travel Guide
The map
The grandfather paints a map of the family’s tory and it’s this map which shows the journey of each of the characters and their lives in more ways than one.
The novel quite literally maps out vivid descriptions of the Devon and Cornish countryside and the lives and legacies of the characters. As the map is created, their lives go in separate directions but each of the ties that bind them draws them back to the central place – the house on the edge of the world.
The house
Set in Devon, this is the house of the family as the twins grow up, the landscape they live and experience is life in a rural and seemingly idyllic setting. The house is at the centre of the map –
“One hundred and fifty acres fan around it: to the north , a swathe of wooded valley, tangled branches tumbling into the mill stream, to the south, gorse-and hazel- edged grazing; up and east, where the lands settles into wind-washed fields…”
A playground for the young and the home of a range of extremely varied characters such as Crab Man. Many of these are the stuff of local legends such as Thornton’s Devil Stone and mermaids swimming in the sea. The coastline of Cornwall is also detectable with many of the locations inspired by places the author visited in childhood. Bude in particular with its history of the last Cornish shipwrecks is always a place of inspiration and this helped shape the setting of the Sands.
Matthew is the grandfather who holds this family together with his map of their stories. He paints literarily and figuratively the picture of Thornton, the fictional town where they live. On this map and in the landscape are footprints of history and legend which is like a treasure map of a kind since it reveals clues both discovered and left behind in life. Like a modern day Mappa Mundi which shows the history, geography and destiny of humanity in the 13 and 24th centuries.
A mythical map of family stories and the ties that bind us all together.
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