The Herb Girl

The Herb Girl is a psychological novel set in and around Purfleet in Essex in 1923 and concerns the great divide; spiritualism, the complication that may be the after-life and our relationship with it. By way of a damning gypsy's curse, a Scots-born female rogue, savage inexplicable accidents, murder and two of the oldest sexual dysfunctions known to civilisation, The Herb Girl chronicles a few months in the life and close family of a bewitching, heavily-pregnant, Cornish-bred herbalist, whose life is not entirely guiltless. The Herb Girl is a self-contained maze, a story involving poisoning, manslaughter, spiritualism, explosives, and rage. But who is the narrator? What is his wholly abhorrent secret and why is he so personally judgmental?