The Butterfly Cabinet

Description

An unforgettable story of two women linked by their roles in a tragedy at the end of the Victorian era. When Anna, the young woman she cared for as a child, announces her intention to visit the elderly Maddie, Maddie recognises her last chance to unburden herself of a story that has gnawed at her for sixty years. For Maddie, rather like the butterfly cabinet she keeps safely under lock and key, has for too long guarded a secret: that of the day a four-year-old girl died at the big house where she worked as a nanny. Finally, Maddie knows, Anna is ready to hear what happened. As Maddie's mind drifts back through the years, so too is revealed the story of Charlotte's mother, Harriet Ormond. A proud, uncompromising woman, Harriet's great passion is collecting butterflies and pinning them under glass; motherhood comes no easier to her than her role as mistress of her remote Irish estate. When her daughter dies, her community is quick to judge her, and Harriet will not stoop to defend herself. But her journals reveal a more complex truth.

About the Author

Bernie McGilllives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland. She is the author of two novels:The Butterfly CabinetandThe Watch House, which was shortlisted in 2019 for the Irish/European Union Prize for Literature. Her work has been translated into Dutch (Charlotte’s vleugels) and into Italian (La donna che collezionava farfalleandLe parole nell’aria).Her latest publication isThis Train is For, a collection of short stories published by No Alibis Press, Belfast (June 2022).Sleepwalkers, Bernie's first collection of short stories, was published in May 2013 byWhittrick Pressand shortlisted for theEdge Hill Short Story Prize 2014. The title story was first prizewinner in the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest (US) and the collection includes 'Home', a supplementary prizewinner in the 2010Bridport Short Story Prizeand 'No Angel', Second Prizewinner in the Seán Ó Faoláin and the Michael McLaverty Short Story Prizes. Her work has been anthologised inBelfast Stories,Reading the Futureand in the award-winningThe Long Gaze Back,The Glass Shore, and inFemale Lines. She is the recipient of a number of Arts Council Awards as well as a Research Award from theSociety of Authors.She is a former Writing Fellow with theRoyal Literary Fundat theSeamus Heaney Centreat Queen's University, Belfast.Reviews‘McGill writes about life, love and telegraphy with a poet’s clarity’Sunday Times‘Totally absorbing and full of unexpected twists’Sunday Business Post‘A lyrical, wonderfully atmospheric novel’Sunday Express‘McGill proves once again she is a masterful storyteller . . . historical fiction at its absolute best’The Lady‘The Watch House, set on Rathlin Island at the turn of the 20th century, [is] awash in old rituals and impending transformations, in loyalties and enmities and all manner of local witchery.’ Patricia Craig in theIrish TimesBooks of the Year.‘Hard to put down, this atmospheric book will stay with you long after the final heart-rending denouement, setting McGill firmly into the panoply of modern Irish writers’Irish Independent'McGill has the ability to enter into the brain and heart of her characters.' (Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey writing inThe Guardian

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