The Watch House - Softcover

Bernie McGill was born and raised in Northern Ireland and attended Queen's University, Belfast. Her first novel, The Butterfly Cabinet, was published by Headline Review in 2011. Bernie is also the author of Sleepwalkers, a collection of short fiction (shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize) and a contributor to three acclaimed anthologies of Irish women writers, The Long Gaze Back, The Glass Shore and Female Lines (New Island, 2015, 2016 & 2017). She has numerous theatre credits to her name. Bernie lives in Portstewart, Northern Ireland, with her family.

I should like to applaud the strength and clarity of Bernie McGill's novel The Watch House, set on Rathlin Island at the turn of the 20th century, and awash in old rituals and impending transformations, in loyalties and enmities and all manner of local witchery. -- Patricia Craig * Irish Times Books of the Year * Displays the surest instinct for human nature in all its complexity and fascination... endlessly intriguing and exhilarating -- Patricia Craig * Dublin Review of Books * A lyrical, wonderfully atmospheric novel * Sunday Express * An evocative novel that's brimming with suspense... [it] reels you in and keeps a grip on you until the very end * The Incubator * The Watch House is beautiful and lyrical, tender and fierce; one of those rare novels, with the power to break you clean in two... Bernie McGill writes with such lightness of touch and tremendous heart... this is storytelling at its best -- Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown Hard to put down, this atmospheric book will stay with you long after the final, heart-rendering denouement * Belfast Telegraph * A novel to haunt you * Sunday Mirror * McGill proves once again she is a masterful storyteller . . . historical fiction at its absolute best * Lady * McGill writes about life, love and telegraphy with a poet's clarity * The Sunday Times *