‘Although the central character of this spare and elegant first novel is a witch, it is no more a ‘tale of the occult’ than ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a futuristic fantasy. Wilson uses a seventeenth-century witch-hanging as the premise for a chilling examination of a community struggling to make sense of its deepest suspicions and resentments by denying them a human face. The accused witch, the clever and mutinous Alice Slade, has maintained power over her neighbors by knowing them better than they are willing to know themselves: of her murderous acts, she says: ‘You needed the harm, all of you, so I hurt you. You were ready for it.’ The night before Alice is to be hanged, the vicar, struggling with his shredded faith, tries to extract from her a conventional confession, in order to expunge her more convincing taunts. Meanwhile, her accusers, their voices closing in on the reader like a dark fugue, confront or betray the weaknesses she so successfully mined. Instead of setting witchcraft outside the pale, Wilson exposes the fragile boundaries between religion, magic, self-deception and madness. One looks forward to more from this writer, whose penetrating gaze would, in the world she has created, warrant hanging.’

New Yorker

You can buy Malefice online from Amazon.co.uk.

The Mountain of Immoderate Desires, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1994, Phoenix Paperbacks 1995

‘This is a rich, sexy, exhilarating novel with a serious moral centre.’

The Spectator

Samule Pink has a secret: he is Queen Victoria’s illegitimate son. Educated in an obscure Dorset rectory, he is sent at the age of twenty-one to Hong-Kong, a far-flung outpost of empire with a dubious reputation. An innocent, he hopes, against the odds, to achieve a brilliant career, but finds that life in the colony in the 1890s offers more distractions than expected – what with Mrs Darley’s sexual invitations, the enticements of religious fervour, the social pressures of the Club – and Lily.

Lily has been brought to Hong-Kong by her eccentric protector Mr Jackson. Her job is to partner him in the erotic Taoist exercises that make men immortal. But when Mr Jackson dies after all, Lily has to find another means of support.

Samuel and Lily’s entanglement is complicated by the fact that neither is quite sure who they are. Samuel’s dubious birth confuses him; Lily, although born in Suchow, is too English to be accepted by the Chinese. And somebody is watching Samuel on his mother ’s behalf…

‘I did enjoy, and admire this novel so much. It satisfies on so many levels – it gives me that good story I always crave, it involved me with two moving and utterly believable characters, it transported me to turn-of-the century Hong Kong, and it made me think about all kinds of quite deep moral issues.’ Margaret Forster

‘Wilson has a vigorous imagination, and her novel, with its detailed canvas of Hong Kong a hundred years ago, is unfailingly fascinating.’
Financial Times.

‘Powerful and brilliant’
Penelope Fitzgerald, London Review of Books

‘The teeming world of Victorian colonial Hong Kong comes vibrantly alive in Wilson’s ingenious and captivating novel…Throughout, Wilson’s delightful quicksilver style is a fine-tuned instrument unmasking Victorian hypocrisies.’
Publisher’s Weekly

The Mountain of Immoderate Desires won the Southern Arts prize for fiction in 1997 .

You can buy The Mountain of Immoderate Desires online from Amazon HERE.