Wakening the Crow - Softcover

With the looming shadow of Edgar Allan Poe falling over one family, Gregory takes the reader into a world of uncertainty and fear.

Oliver Gooch comes across a tooth, in a velvet box, with a handwritten note from 1888 to say it's a tooth from the boy Edgar Allan Poe. He displays it in his new bookshop, and names the store Poe's Tooth Books.

Oliver took the money from his small daughter Chloe's accident insurance and bought a converted church to live in with his altered child and wife. Rosie hopes Chloe will came back to herself but Oliver is secretly relieved to have this new easy-to-manage child, and holds at bay the guilt that the accident was a result of his negligence. On a freezing night he and Chloe come across the crow, a raggedy skeletal wretch of a bird, and it refuses to leave. It infiltrates their lives, it alters Oliver's relationship with Rosie, it changes Chloe. It's a dangerous presence in the firelit, shadowy old vestry, in Poe's Tooth Books.

Inexorably the family, the tooth, the crow, the church and their story will draw to a terrifying climax.

Stephen Gregory is a former Hollywood screenwriter who has worked with director William Freidkin, among others. A Welsh writer, he was born in Derby, England and gained a law degree from the University of London. As a teacher he travelled the world for work, moving from Bangor in Wales to Algiers and the Sudan. His novel The Cormorant was made into a BBC film starring Ralph Fiennes. This is his second novel for Solaris.