Rotherweird

Andrew Caldecott's debut opens in 1558, when twelve children of extraordinary gifts are exiled by Elizabeth I to the remote town of Rotherweird. Some call them a golden generation; some call them the devil's spawn. Either way they are feared, and the town they are sent to is severed from the rest of England, granted independence on one strange condition: no one may study Rotherweird or its history.

Four and a half centuries on, the prohibition still holds. The town keeps its own laws and its own eccentric hierarchy of scholars — until an Outsider arrives, a man of unparalleled wealth and power, with money enough to buy Rotherweird outright and every secret buried beneath it.

Caldecott, a barrister by profession, writes in a deliberately baroque register that reviewers have compared to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast: a closed, rule-bound society, oddly named citizens, and a mystery whose roots reach into an alternate world. It is the first book of a trilogy completed by Wyntertide and Lost Acre.