To Sleep No More

Name: To Sleep No More
Rating: 3.82 (522 reviews)

by Deryn Lake

First published 1987

Amazon

3.8(522)

In fourteenth-century Sussex, Oriel de Sharndene is forced into a politically useful marriage even though she loves a Gascon squire. Their relationship is complicated by the sense that the three people at its centre have met before, and that the emotional conflict binding them cannot be resolved within a single lifetime.

The same pattern returns in later incarnations, carrying the story through seventeenth-century fears of witchcraft and into an eighteenth-century world of smugglers and highwaymen. Rather than treating the historical periods as separate episodes, Lake uses reincarnation to connect changing laws, beliefs and social expectations around the same unresolved relationships. Mayfield and the Sussex landscape become the fixed ground across which the characters repeatedly encounter one another and attempt to alter their fate.