Book
The Winter Ghosts
by Kate Mosse
Buy the book from:
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.