On the Nature of Magic
Published on 23. May 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
416 pages
978-1-80336-134-5 (ISBN)
Description
Spanning London's occult seances to the Parisian catacombs, two women claim to have seen Marie Antoinette's ghost in the garden of Versailles in this Gothic supernatural mystery where magic and science collide.
It's 1902 and Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for finding answers to the impossible, has started her own detective agency. She takes on two new uncanny cases, both located in Paris - which itself is too much of a coincidence to ignore. In the first case, two English women claim to have seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles. The second case is the murder of a young woman working at the mysterious Melies Star Films studio outside Paris.
As Helena and her colleague Eliza investigate, they hear whispers of vanishings at Melies Star Films, strange lights, spies, actors flying without ropes and connections to the occult.
What is George Melies practising at his secretive film studio? And is it connected to the haunting in Versailles? Helena and Eliza will only find the answers if they accept the natural world is darker, stranger than they could ever have imagined...
It's 1902 and Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for finding answers to the impossible, has started her own detective agency. She takes on two new uncanny cases, both located in Paris - which itself is too much of a coincidence to ignore. In the first case, two English women claim to have seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles. The second case is the murder of a young woman working at the mysterious Melies Star Films studio outside Paris.
As Helena and her colleague Eliza investigate, they hear whispers of vanishings at Melies Star Films, strange lights, spies, actors flying without ropes and connections to the occult.
What is George Melies practising at his secretive film studio? And is it connected to the haunting in Versailles? Helena and Eliza will only find the answers if they accept the natural world is darker, stranger than they could ever have imagined...
Reviews / Votes
"An intricately built tale of history, spiritualism, and magic; perfect for fans of Susannah Clarke."A.C. Wise, author of Wendy, Darling
"Marian Womack is fiendishly inventive. She creates magic."
Priya Sharma, author of Ormeshadow
"Like the fantastical early cinema at the centre of its plot, On the Nature of Magic occupies a region midway between science and sorcery - and Marian Womack excels at the tricky balancing act, mixing methodical deductive processes with bursts of wild imagination. Highly recommended to all lovers of gaslit crime and the Gothic!"
Tim Major, author of Sherlock Holmes and The Twelve Thefts of Christmas
Praise for The Golden Key
With hints of the brooding Gothic of Rawblood and Rebecca, this wonderfully creepy historical novel makes it absolutely clear that Marian Womack is a rising star.
Tim Major
An intriguing and unsettling tale. . . Womack brings a great sense of the uncanny to the Fens.
Alison Littlewood
The Golden Key mesmerizes... A beguiling mystery that lingers long after reading.
Katherine Stansfield
A fey, unsettling vision of Norfolk, and London, that fans of The Essex Serpent will love... This book gives up its secrets like a puzzle box.
G.V. Anderson
A fascinating, unsettling tale that shifts, mutates and changes meaning much like the eerie ruined house in the fens at the centre of this weird and brilliant debut novel.
Lisa Tuttle
Praise for The Swimmers
"A meticulously detailed novel set in a vivid, believable eco-dystopia... Womack draws in readers immediately with her dreamy depictions of the landscape and its dangers. At its heart, however, the novel is a probing examination of cultural and class differences. Readers will be captivated." - Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"A richly imagined eco-gothic tale."
The Guardian
"Exquisitely realised."
The Times, 10 Best SF Books of 2021
For Annihilation fans, the prose is fluid & gorgeously intimate. The questions of our future-a sea of plastic/the intersection of class & climate change-are explored on a tender, personal scale.
G.V. Anderson
Womack has an eye for both the beauty and the horror of the natural world. Like a strange fever dream, the world of The Swimmers is uncanny and unfamiliar, wonderfully compelling and utterly inescapable. One of my favourite books of the year.
Helen Marshall
Jane Eyre meets Annihilation in this ingenious, bewitching novel. The prose is as lush and terrifying as the warped jungle Earth has become. This is speculative fiction at its best: thought-provoking, riveting, and gorgeously told.
Jennie Melamed
Womack is an exciting and endlessly inventive writer. I look forward to reading everything she writes. Naomi Booth
Womack is a wonderful writer, and The Swimmers is a marvellous, heartbreaking exploration of the world we are busy creating, and the world we must then inhabit.
Aliya Whiteley
Praise for Lost Objects
Intriguing and illuminating... chockfull of interesting ideas about the natural world and ourselves.
Jeff VanderMeer
Marian Womack weaves together the lyricism of Angela Carter, the mad imagination of China Mieville, and the earthiness of Robert Macfarlane.
Helen Marshall
Luminous and disturbing as the unearthly things they describe, Marian Womack's gorgeously written tales map the shifting boundaries between waking life and dream, past and future and our own profoundly unsettled present. Reading them left me with goosebumps, and the craving for more stories by this supremely gifted new writer.
Elizabeth Hand
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 35 mm
Weight
304 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80336-134-5 (9781803361345)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Marian Womack, author of "The Golden Key" and "The Swimmers", was born in Andalusia and educated in the UK. Her debut short story collection, Lost Objects (Luna Press, 2018) was shortlisted for two BSFA awards and one BFS award. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop, and she holds degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities. She writes at the intersection between weird and gothic fiction, and her stories normally deal with strange landscapes, ghostly encounters, or uncanny transformations. Marian lives in Cambridge, at the edge of the Fens, with her husband, their children and two aging Spanish cats. When she is not writing she can be found working as an academic librarian, or editing books and pamphlets in her indie publishing project, Calque Press.