In this sweeping and powerful epic the journey begins in the 'terrible beauty' of Northern Ireland during a time when conflict reigns and no one is spared from tragedy and sorrow, the time known as The Troubles. Who is she? What does she desire? The answer is more terrible and stranger than Iris could have imagined. As the narratives converge, Iris seeks her out in a confrontation that shatters her past and her reality, revealing the chasm in Iris' own fractured identity. Iris' mother, pregnant, walks the halls of Rawblood whispering to her, coaxing her to come. Iris' father, his medical career in ruins, conducts unconscionable experiments to discover how she travels in the Villarca blood. Instead she meets betrayal and a fate worse than death. Iris' grandmother sets sail from Dover to Italy with a hired companion, to spend her final years in the sun before consumption takes her. Iris' story is interwoven with the past, the voices of the dead - Villarcas, taken by her. The consequences of her choice are immediate and horrific. Iris makes her father a promise: to remain alone all her life.

When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child - she comes, and death follows. Her origins are a mystery, but her purpose is clear. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. And one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother's grave, she forces the truth from her father. Papa told her so.įorbidden to speak to other children or the servants, denied her one friend, Iris grows up in solitude. Iris knows it's because of a congenital disease that means she must be strictly isolated. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris and her father are the last of their name. In 1910, 11-year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor.

Rawblood book