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Автор Хелен Данмор

PENGUIN BOOKS

ZENNOR IN DARKNESS

Helen Dunmore has published nine novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby and House of Orphans. She is also a poet, children’s novelist and short-story writer.

HELEN DUNMORE

ZENNOR IN DARKNESS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Viking 1993

First published in Penguin Books 1994

This edition published 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193925-4

One

One faint shriek. Then another. Three girls fling themselves over the top of the last dune and skid down warm flanks of sand. Marram grass slashes their ankles and sand kicks up behind Clare and Peggy, into Hannah’s eyes. She’s the heaviest and the last.

Dazzled, laughing, out of breath, prickling with sweat under their dress-shields, they flounder through the knee-deep shifting white sand, and then down and down in a heap on the hard, flat beach. Clare and Hannah collapse together, their mouths full of each other’s hair. Their ankle boots are heavy with sand. Their hair has come down, and their straw hats flop against their shoulder-blades. They clasp each other. They smell of sweat and sunburned hair, and there’s a faint smell of violet perfume from Hannah, who has lavished the last precious drops of Wood Violet on her wrists and under her ears. She doesn’t know where she will get another bottle, but today she has something to celebrate. There is her half-day’s holiday from the shop, there is this perfection of early summer, and, above all, kept until last for fear of the ill-luck which always trudges in the wake of complete happiness: