Award-winning Tim Powers twists and shapes history into the most fantastical and fiercely atmospheric gothic horror featuring the Brontë family. If you know Howarth, the surrounding moors, and the timeline of the Brontës then you will feel oh-so at home, however the inclusion of the supernatural could well send your thoughts into overdrive. Be warned, you will encounter pagan gods and lycanthropy and yet it feels entirely reasonable to believe in this world. The plot wields a knife as it darts and weaves through the pages. While much time is spent dwelling in vengeance and darkness, love and hope also kept me company. Knowing the actual fate of the family doesn’t lessen the uneasiness, rather it increased as I followed their footsteps towards the end, and faithful hound Keeper is still with me. My Brother’s Keeper disturbs and it stimulates and throughly provokes as it follows the Brontës into torment.
In a parsonage at the edge of the moors, a widowed rector lives with his family: three daughters and their dissolute brother, Bramwell.
Though the future will celebrate Charlotte, Emily and Anne, right now they are unknown, their genius concealed. In just a few short years they will all be dead, and it will be middle sister Emily's chance encounter with a grievously wounded man on the moor that sets them on the path to their doom.
For there is an ancient pagan secret haunting the moors, a dark inheritance in the family bloodline and something terrible buried under an ogham-inscribed slab in the church. Not only are their lives at stake, but their very souls.
My Brother's Keeper is an atmospheric gothic novel that mixes diabolical hatred and vengeance with the supreme power of love to conjure dark magic from the tragic fate of the Brontë sisters.
Tim Powers is a two-time winner of both the World Fantasy and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Awards and three-time Locus Award recipient. He lives in San Bernardino, California.
