The best-selling novelist Karen Powell is the guest on this month’s Book Club Podcast, where Sarah Meyrick interviews her about Fifteen Wild Decembers, which is this month’s choice.

Michael Wheeler has written an essay about the book in the 7 June edition of the Church Times.

Fifteen Wild Decembers is a re-imagining of the life of Emily Brontë set against the wild moors of the author’s beloved Yorkshire — the same wild landscape that inspired her best-known novel Wuthering Heights. The book’s title is taken from Brontë’s poem “Remembrance”, words spoken at the graveside of her past love — “Cold in the earth — and fifteen wild Decembers”. She, too, like her lost love, ends up living a short life. In this first-person narrative, we hear Emily’s account of the domestic struggles that she has with her siblings from schooldays to adulthood, and the long journey to publication of not only her work, but that of her sisters, too.

Fifteen Wild Decembers is published by Europa Editions at £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99); 978-1-78770-545-6.

Karen Powell grew up in Rochester, Kent, and now lives in North Yorkshire. 

Sarah Meyrick is a novelist. Her latest novel is Joy and Felicity (Sacristy Press, 2021). 

The Church Times Book Club is run in association with the Festival of Faith and Literature. 

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Click the play button above to listen to this podcast. You can also listen to the Church Times Podcast on the Church Times app for iPhone and iPad, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most other podcast platforms. Music for the podcast is by Twisterium.