Blackthorn Winter

In April, when blackthorn blossom clothes the hedgerows like a wedding veil, there sometimes comes a frost so severe that it seems as if the summer will never come. Country people call this a blackthorn winter.

For Claudia Barron, arriving in the Dorset village of Court Barton that April, blackthorn winter seems like a metaphor for everything that has happened to her. Hiding from her previous life, she adopts an assumed name and applies for a job in the local school. But villages don’t much like mysteries and secrets and soon the inhabitants of Court Barton set out to find out what it is that Claudia Barron is hiding from and why.

Blackthorn Winter is Sarah Challis’s third novel and once again she gives us her own particularly seductive cast of characters, old and young, woven into a story of drama and humour and love – set against the ravishing Dorset countryside which she knows so well.