Carrion Crow by Heather Parry review – a stomach-clenching contender for awards

A woman is confined to the attic by her mother in a thrillingly told novel that revels in squalor

Heather Parry’s Carrion Crow sets out its stall magnificently from the off, throwing the reader right into the deep end of a claustrophobic gothic grotesque. It catalogues one young woman’s steady descent into incarcerated madness, becoming, as it goes, exponentially unsettling and increasingly stomach-churning.

Marguerite Périgord lives a stone’s throw from the “shit-stink” of the River Thames in Victorian London with her family in a crumbling house that once was grand, but is no more. She has been confined to the attic, the sinister opening lines convey, “for the sake of her wellbeing. That’s what her mother had said.”