How Pale the Winter Has Made Us (Paperback) - Adam Scovell

Isabelle is alone in Strasbourg. Receiving news of her father's suicide, she misses her flight back to London and a new university job, opting to stay in her partner's empty flat over the winter. How Pale the Winter Has Made Us rummages through the crumbling ruins of a life, building cartographies of place and death under a darkening sky.

Isabelle is alone in Strasbourg. The day after her partner leaves to travel abroad, she receives news of her father's suicide, his body found hanging in a park back home in Crystal Palace. Isabelle misses her flight back to London and a new university job, opting to stay in her partner's empty flat over the winter. Obsessed with the many strange coincidences in Strasbourg's turbulent history, Isabelle seeks to slowly dissolve into the past, succumbing to visions and dreams as she develops her meticulous research about the city. Stalked by the unnerving spirit of the Erl-King she fears something else has died along with her father; the spectres of Europe communicating a hidden truth beneath the melancholy. How Pale the Winter Has Made Us rummages through the crumbling ruins of a life, building cartographies of place and death under a darkening sky.

About the Author

Adam Scovell is a writer and filmmaker from Merseyside now based in London. His writing has featured in The Times, BFI, Little White Lies and The Quietus. He runs the website, Celluloid Wicker Man, and his film work has been screened at a variety of festivals and events. In 2015, he worked with Robert Macfarlane on an adaptation of his Sunday Times best-seller, Holloway, and has worked on films alongside Stanley Donwood, Iain Sinclair and BAFTA-nominated director, Paul Wright. His first novel, Mothlight, was published by Influx Press in 2019.