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Published Sep 2012
320 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
In the bestselling tradition of The Night Circus and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, Adam McOmber's hauntingly original debut novel follows a young woman in Victorian England whose peculiar abilities help her infiltrate a mysterious secret society.
Young Jane Silverlake lives with her father at a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret - an unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of manmade objects - and this talent isolates her from the outside world. Her greatest joy is wandering the wild heath with her neighbors, Madeline and Nathan. But as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by the feelings both girls develop for Nathan, and by Nathan's interest in a cult led by a charismatic mystic popular with London's elite.
A year later, Nathan has vanished, and Jane is forced to untangle the events that led up to his disappearance. As a sinister truth emerges, she realizes that she must call on her dark gift – the only thing that can now save Nathan.
"McOmber creates a convoluted supernatural mystery that bombards the senses with rich dialogue and imagery; but the story’s flow is often lost amid lengthy explanations about motive and meaning, and the narrative may ultimately prove difficult for some to follow." - Kirkus
"McOmber’s debut is deliberately written and heavy with atmosphere, evoking the dark weight of doomed love as well as the spiritualist craze that fascinated so many Victorians." - Publishers Weekly
"In his clever and beguiling pastiche of a first novel, McOmber explores the nexus between the natural and the artificial, the intangible and the concrete in coal-fouled Victorian London.…Commandingly erudite and imaginative, McOmber meshes myth, the occult, and nineteenth-century technological advances in an uncanny and captivating gothic tale that aligns ancient mysteries with the startling revelations of newly harnessed electricity, and rigid social and sexual mores with epic yearning." - Booklist
"The White Forest drips with the dark and gothic chills of Victorian London. Adam McOmber will keep you up nights with this eerie tale that grafts mystery to myth. A spooky and original novel." - Keith Donohue, author of The Stolen Child and Centuries of June
"The White Forest reminds me of what I love about H.P. Lovecraft: Adam McOmber's imagery is so visceral and strangely real, and his story so inventive: a plain old narrative is hard enough to pull off on its own, but creating a whole new world within thereality of Victorian England? Wow." - Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish
"What other novelist could take a Victorian gothic setting, the most obscure elements of medieval cosmology, a sinister secret society, and an old-fashioned love triangle to produce, in tautly elegant prose, something so delightful and utterly unique? The White Forest is much more than a novel: it is a magic lantern, casting dark and flickering pictures from other worlds. I wish I had written it myself." - Camille DeAngelis, author of Petty Magic and Mary Modern
"Mr. McOmber's economy of words drew me in and kept me turning pages...The novel's gothic style only adds to the delicious tension of the story, and the reader can actually lose him/herself in the atmospheric telling of a tale that could very well be turned into a film." - Book Hog
This information about The White Forest was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Adam McOmber teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and is the associate editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika. Stories from his collection, This New and Poisonous Air, have been shortlisted for Best American Fantasy and nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in 2012. Visit him at www.adammcomber.com
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