Reading: Drowned Country (62/365)

Drowned Country is the sequel to Emily Tesh's Silver in the Wood, which I read about this time last year and really enjoyed. Taking Silver's point of view this time, rather than Tobias's, it begins with the two estranged, for reasons which gradually become clear, and with Silver wallowing in self-pity about it. He is interrupted in this by his mother (who is just as wonderfully acerbic in this book as she was in the first) who demands he come with her to help her and Tobias rescue a young woman who has been kidnapped by a vampire in a seaside town which sounds an awful lot like Whitby.

Like Silver in the Wood, this is a gloriously atmospheric book which really manages to evoke a sense of the natural world and the rhythm of the seasons, while Tesh draws on folklore, fairytales and prehistory to come up with a plot which never turned the way I was expecting it to. I thought it was absolutely delightful.