The Winter Ghosts

by Kate Mosse

First published 2009

Amazon

3.6(20,081)

France, 1928. Freddie Watson remains psychologically damaged by the death of his brother during the First World War. While travelling through the Pyrenees, he crashes in a snowstorm and reaches an isolated village, where he meets Fabrissa at a local gathering. Their conversation about grief and lost families offers him an intimacy he has been unable to find elsewhere.

By morning Fabrissa has disappeared, and Freddie’s search leads towards a cave and a tragedy rooted in the medieval persecution of Cathars. The novella joins interwar trauma to the older history of Languedoc, using a ghost story to explore remembrance, survivor’s guilt and the recovery of names erased by violence. Its supernatural element remains inseparable from the historical need to acknowledge the dead.