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The Angelic Avengers
The Angelic Avengers
Dec 6, 2025 12:52 AM

Author:Isak Dinesen

The Angelic Avengers

Lucan has been orphaned and Zosine has been deserted, and London is a hostile place for two young girls without a home. Bound together by poverty, grief and their shared years at school, they set out to make a future for themselves in new surroundings. They are adopted by the austere, puritanical Reverend Pennhallow and his wife, and in their large, gloomy house they become immersed in study. But, after a chain of disturbing events, it does not take long before they realize that the cleric and his wife are not all they seem to be ...

Reviews

An astonishing story of broken dreams, greed and human frailty.A tale of extraordinary power. Quite simply outstanding

—— Daily Mail

Hugely entertaining.immensely thought-provoking

—— Daily Express

Powerful.vividly evoked

—— Sunday Times

Deborah Moggach can fit a complex idea onto a postage stamp... ordinary human crises are described tersely, compassionately, and with a wit as dry as the Sahara

—— Independent

Moggach's delight in spinning her story, and in the minor characters she invents, is infectious

—— Mail on Sunday

'The excitement and disquiet gained spectacular, page-turning momentum...There are many highlights in Nicoll's sweeping and assured narrative...but the real star of White Male Heart is the Highlands...it is his supreme gift that he pulls this off on the page. He creates a backdrop so vivid that it becomes integral to the action...Meaty stuff indeed'

—— Scotland on Sunday

'An explosively violent début...Nicoll reveals himself every bit as much a natural-born writer...lighting the fuses for his Highland Götterdämmerung'

—— The Scotsman

'At once both brutal and beautiful...White Male Heart owes an obvious debt to Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and a less obvious one to Andrew Greig's Electric Brae, both also remarkable debut novels by Scottish men, but Ruaridh Nicoll stakes out a corner of the territory that is uniquely his. The quality of the observation is breathtaking ...this is an absorbing and uncomfortable read, raising as many questions as it answers about what it means to be a young man in a territory where the roles are few and growing more limited with every passing year. But White Male Heart has far wider relevance than that. This is a novel that is both heart-rending and heart-stopping but which never loses sight of the importance of the blackest of humour. It is without question a welcome and worthy addition to the growing sub-genre of tartan noir'

—— VAL McDERMID , The Express
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