Pine: The spine-chilling Sunday Times bestseller
£3.80
WINNER of the McIlvanney Prize 2020
Shortlisted for Bloody Scotland’s Scottish Crime Debut of the Year 2020
Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2020
‘Hugely atmospheric, exquisitely written and utterly gripping’ LUCY FOLEY, author of The Hunting Party
‘It’s both eerie and thrilling at once, and had me under its spell until the end’ SOPHIE MACKINTOSH, author of Blue Ticket and The Water Cure
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They are driving home from the search party when they see her. The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men.
Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she’s gone.
In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago.
Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father’s turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.
In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophobia. In a place that can feel like the edge of the word, she unites the chill of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times.
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Readers love PINE:
***** ‘A beautifully written and incredibly atmospheric debut.’
***** ‘Francine Toon is an author to watch out for.’
***** ‘Would recommend to anyone who loves folk horror.’
***** ‘A perfect spooky Halloween read!’
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Additional information
| Publisher | Transworld Digital (23 Jan. 2020) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 3660 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 330 pages |
by alex grist
Whilst reading it was easy to imagine being sat around a fire, a circle of people each sharing their own tale, this would be the story the finishes the festivities, leaving all to a sleepless night.
by Kindle Customer
This type of book is a first for me with a mix of supernatural and thriller vibes. I loved the story and found myself constantly questioning everything I would recommend.
by Antonia
Driving home through the forest one night, Lauren and her father encounter a strange woman on the road, barefoot and freezing in nothing but a dressing gown. They take her home, but by morning she’s vanished and nobody but Lauren remembers her. Who was she? And what is her connection to Lauren?
I absolutely adored this book. Ten-year-old Lauren’s perspective is expertly handled by Toon, hinting at deeper truths and a darker history in their small town than Lauren is fully aware of. Every character feels completely real, flawed and fascinating. I always look for books featuring well-written working class characters, and so this was perfect for me. I got a great sense of the limitations of this small community, the fixed ideas of masculinity and femininity that hold the characters in thrall, unable to break out of their stereotypes. This was particularly powerfully done in the character of Niall, Lauren’s father, a complex and not particularly likeable person who I was angry with at times, and yet at other times I could sympathise with.
This story is a very slow burn, mostly introspective, yet builds to a gripping finale that had me desperate to find out the truth. Grief and loss pervade the narrative, making for an emotionally devastating read that nonetheless sounds a note of hope.
by Mrs. Lj Hart
Seven-year-old Lauren is being driven to trick or treating by her dad who says that this will be her last year of going out on Halloween. Her mum’s not around and she’s secretly pinched Mum’s lipstick to create a ragged line of vampire blood from her mouth, which she denies when Dad asks. She’s pleased with the outfit she’s created and the way the torn bin bag cape flutters out behind her.
On their way to best-friend, Billy’s house, she sees a figure on the edge of the woods wearing a startling white dressing gown, Dad’s curse suggests he has seen the woman too but he denies it and continues on. After they have visited the three local houses around Billy’s, they head for home when the girl in the dressing gown looms in front of their pick-up forcing Dad to swerve. Again, he denies seeing anything but nonetheless he gets out of the pick-up; Lauren follows and finds him holding the shivering girl and promising to get her home safely.
Dad insists she gives the girl space on the double seat front seat, so Lauren’s journey home is from the awkward position on her dad’s knee and tucked under the steering wheel. Lauren observes the girl from this position, conscious that her precious hoard of Halloween treats has tipped into the well of the pick-up. After dinner, the pair disappear into the bathroom and Lauren eventually gives up waiting for them and goes to bed.
The following morning, she wakes late to a silent house and discovers her father alone and grumpy in his bed and claiming to be unwell. When she asks about the girl from the night before, he angrily tells her that he doesn’t know what she is talking about. Both are given a welcome reprieve from the other when Billy phones to invite her to his house for apple scones. Meeting Billy partway, the pair skate around the edges of the pine woods that are as big as their neighbourhood and surrounding farms.
As they both stare into the dense branches of the pine woods there is a flash of white fabric, Lauren questions Billy who claims to have seen nothing but then claims to have a headache.
Who is the mysterious girl/woman and why are Lauren and older resident, Vairy, the only ones to recall seeing her with any clarity? The reader is given the impression that this mysterious creature is somehow related to Lauren’s mum’s, Christine’s, disappearance when Lauren was just a baby. None of the villagers will talk about Christine in any detail and her father, Niall, becomes angry and withdrawn when Lauren asks questions. Through different fragmented descriptions it is inferred that she is a beautiful and exotic witch from Edinburgh in the midst of people who have grown up and grown stale in a Highland village suspended in time and mediocrity.
Lauren’s mum’s strangeness is also the reason for the bullying she has to endure at school and which has become so bad that she gains comfort from the antler-handled fold-up hunting knife she’s stolen from her father’s toolbox. Only Billy and two older neighbours’ children look out for her and step in when seven-year-old Maisie seeks out every opportunity to ridicule and hurt Lauren.
Too many similes and an initial almost formulaic style gives this book an early sense of trying too hard; thankfully this quickly disappears as the author finds their own style to create a book which is immersive and engaging but with an awareness of the full author’s toolbox. Even these early pages are relieved by descriptive brilliance, such as: ‘In the summer, someone kicked Lauren’s stick hut to pieces and stole the tarpaulin roof, as well as a huge cake tin that contained a bottle of lemon Fanta and five back issues of The Beano.’ I was totally gripped by Pine, finishing the book in three days.
The twists and turns keep the reader guessing and Christine’s ghost is the ever-present force which keeps them safe and eventually uncovers the reasons for her disappearance and releases her father’s demons.
Pine was released to huge acclaim and this no spoilers review skates around the story in a way that I hope is sufficiently beguiling to temp you into buying it. Sadly, poet Francine hasn’t written any novels since this award-winning debut but I will certainly keep my eyes peeled for her next fictional offerings.
by SusannahB
Ten-year-old Lauren lives with her father in a small town in the highlands of Scotland; her mother, the beautiful, fey, tarot card-reading Christine, disappeared when Lauren was a baby and Lauren’s father, Niall, refuses to talk to his daughter about her. Relying on copious amounts of alcohol to numb the pain of his wife’s disappearance, Niall is not the best of fathers, but he does love Lauren and, when he is sober, he tries to make up for his lapses. Lauren, however, has to cope with bullying at school from children who think she’s weird and who have also picked up on rumours that Niall may have had something to do with his wife’s disappearance. Fortunately Lauren does have a few friends, one of whom is Billy, and it is with Billy that she spends most of her time playing in the woods and also with whom she spends a dark, cold Halloween evening ‘trick or treating’ (or ‘guising’ as it’s called in Scotland). Driving home with her father after her evening out with Billy, Lauren is surprised when she sees a strange woman dressed only in a white dressing gown wandering into the road, and even more surprised when her father stops the car and takes the woman home with them. The next morning the woman has gone and her father doesn’t seem to remember the woman or his actions of the night before, but the woman in white appears again when Lauren is in the woods with Billy – however, although Billy sees the woman, as soon as she disappears he can’t remember having seen her. Lauren feels confused and isolated – she can’t talk to anyone about these strange appearances, and she can’t talk to her father about her mother. And then there is the locked room that her father will not let Lauren enter – but why? And that strange smell that pervades the house – what is it? Is Lauren’s imagination playing tricks on her or is there something rather sinister going on? And when a local girl goes missing, Lauren’s life becomes even more frightening and confusing.
A very atmospheric story with some evocative descriptions of the Scottish Highlands and of the small town in which Lauren and her father live – the author, who is also a poet, grew up in the Highlands and has put her experiences to good use in this, her first book. Parts of this novel kept me intrigued and involved in the story and there were parts to it that made me feel very unsettled, but I wasn’t “chilled to the marrow” as one of the comments on the cover of the book suggested might happen and remarks such as: “carefully calibrated to make every single hair on the back of your neck stand up on end” led me to expect a much more horrifying story than I actually found it to be. It is true, as already commented, there were parts to this that certainly made me feel unsettled – but this was mostly due to the way the author slowly (and it is slowly) built the tension in her story rather than the supernatural aspect (which I feel didn’t really work) and I actually think that the ‘thriller’ aspect of the plot could have stood well enough on its own without the ghostly apparitions. So, in summary, good for a debut novel and I would be interested in seeing what Ms Toon decides on for her next book, but I do feel that the amount of hype surrounding some new novels often does the author of the book a disservice by leading readers (or this one, anyhow) to expect something rather different to what they actually get. I’ve given this novel 3 Stars – which, in my view, is not a negative rating, but reflects that I felt some parts worked better than others.
3 Stars.