Poor Baby

Sarah Bernstein, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist and the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Study for Obedience, remakes the Gothic in a novel haunted by the spectres of complicity and inheritance.

An unnamed narrator and her partner, Emil, are the new occupants of Westermoy, an old gamekeeper’s cottage, hidden from the rest of a vast country estate by a dense wood. He is overseeing an ambitious regeneration while she is employed as a gardener. Not long after the young couple moves into the cottage, she discovers she is pregnant.
    But even from the first happy evening of their arrival, there are spaces in Westermoy where she does not like to tread—an anteroom that she passes as quickly as she can, a corner in the raised beds where nothing grows. The gamekeeper watches her as she works in the glasshouses, and an old woman, Bernadette, who feels terribly familiar, keeps edging her toe into the door, prying it open, insisting she clean Westermoy, while dispensing advice about the pregnancy and upcoming labour.
    Emil is taken away suddenly by the estate’s owner on business, and almost as soon as he leaves, the narrator finds herself besieged by mysterious letters, spectral figures and the uncanny persistence of history.
    Fecund and incantatory, Poor Baby is a novel of inheritance and its hauntings, one that again showcases Sarah Bernstein’s singular brilliance.