2025/135: The Naked Light — Bridget Collins

2025/135: The Naked Light — Bridget Collins

"They kept themselves safe from the faceless ones. They warded them off. Whereas now... now the faceless ones are not a metaphor at all. Now they are real. Real men, whose faces have been shot or torn or burnt away, by other men ... [loc. 1699]

The setting is (mostly) the Sussex village of Haltington in the aftermath of WW1. Florence Stock has come to live with Dr Manning, her widowed brother-in-law who's the vicar of Haltington, and her teenage niece Phoebe. Kit Clayton, home from Paris after a year or so of creating lifelike tin and enamel masks for facially disfigured men, has moved into the Bone House: not as macabre as it sounds, but the former home of the Bone family, now extinct. 

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