This might be the best book I've read all year . . . creepy, pagan, detailed, entrancing. I loved it.

Smart, creepy . . . glittering and menacing . . . deliciously terrifying.

Exploring the darker side of fairytales, it inhabits that liminal space where folklore and horror collide. A worrying tale where reality is filtered through the unreal, and the rational rubs shoulders with the supernatural, this is a beguiling story of love and revenge.

Bruce's spooky novel is lascivious and bloody, a tale of sexual awakening and dark desires that wreathes its leafy tendrils seductively around you, then tightens them until they start to strangle.

Dark and immersive; a feast of storytelling that lingers long after the last morsel's been consumed.

This beguiling and unsettling debut had me hooked from the first page . . . a unique, strange and defiant folk horror story which lingers long in the memory.

A bewitching, beguiling, and deeply unsettling tale of one woman's strange life. It will ensnare you from page one and keep you riveted until the end.

In this storytelling masterclass, everything is inverted.

A glorious, pitch-black fairytale of a book. Lush, strange and defiant. As soon as I finished it, I went straight back to the start and read it again.

Odd and unsettling, this might not be for everyone, but we thought it was magic.

Dark and magical, one of the best books I've read this year.

A fairytale, a psychological portrait and a bleak drama.

A brilliant and sinister debut.

Beautiful, strange . . . hideously dark, delights in unsettling.

Creepy and disturbing right from the start.

A disturbing but brilliant narrative . . . a rare treat.

Has all the ingredients of a modern gothic.

A debut novel that's carefully calibrated to make every single hair on the back of your neck stand up on end

A modern gothic thriller that draws on the author's own Highland childhood

With Pine, (Toon) … has passed the debut hurdle in striking style.

A haunting and heartbreakingly bewitching tale … Packed with folklore, magic and an eerie sense of foreboding every time you turn the page, Pine will captivate readers from the very first page

A gothic stirring of folklore and legend

Eerie and spell-binding

From the first page PINE casts a sense of slowly-rising unease that is completely compelling. It's both eerie and thrilling at once, and had me under its spell until the end

An atmospheric tale of memory and loss

Eerie and dark, you'll be mesmerised by this dramatic tale with its tightly-woven plot

If there's any doubt that the Gothic thriller is enjoying a boom, Francine Toon's debut should settle the matter. PINE, a moving study of memory and loss, is both spooky and tender; drenched in a sense of place and yet eerily timeless

Combines the Gothic sensibilities of Shirley Jackson with the psychologically astute suspense of Gillian Flynn ... will leave you gripped and transfixed

Francine Toon's touching account of a flawed, yet tender, father-daughter relationship in PINE is all the more compelling against the starkly beautiful backdrop of the Scottish highlands

A beautifully crafted gothic tale of isolation and not belonging. Thoroughly gripping and stunningly atmospheric

An atmospheric tale of memory and loss, movingly told through a child's eyes

Many of the themes familiar from Austen’s novels are deftly revisited by Hornby, and the letters that are reimagined are pitch-perfect, with deeply touching confidences shared in family correspondences. You can tell this book by its cover – it’s quite lovely.

Beautiful novel[…] light hearted historical fiction which resembles Austen’s novels, a really lovely read very suitable for incoming spring’

Gill Hornby unfolds it all in her imagination.

Hornby combines a moving portrait of sisterly devotion with a comic depiction of the provincial life so brilliantly evoked in Austen's own novels

[A]t the heart of it all there's a romantic twist..."Hornby is at her best describing the complex bonds between the excellent women of her story. She describes the horrors, but also the pleasures of spinsterhood"