Fiction Reviews
Weavingshaw
(2026) Heba Al-Wasity, Transworld, £20, hrdbk, 453pp, ISBN 978-0-857-50701-3
You may have noticed in recent years that there has been a rise in Fantasy novels with a romantic focus. This ‘romantasy’ seems to have gained a lot of interest amongst young women readers who are devouring anything of that nature they can get their hands on.
With that in mind, Weavingshaw may fit the current interest. This is a Fantasy novel which has a romantic element intertwined with a bit of the Gothic.
The main character is Leena Al-Sayer, a young woman making a basic living in xxxx. As is often in these books, her parents are absent and much of her time is spent looking after her younger brother, Rami.
When her beloved brother, Rami, falls fatally ill, Leena is faced with a terrible choice: Let him die or buy the expensive medicine that will save his life by bartering the only valuable thing she has – her secret.
Enter St. Silas, The Saint of Silence, a ruthless merchant who trades in confessions and is shrouded in unearthly rumours of cruelty and power. whose reputation as a dealer of justice is only made more attractive because of his mysterious background.
Leena’s particular secret is that three years ago she found that she could see and communicate with the dead. Since then, she has hidden herself from the world, knowing that if she ever reveals her curse to others she will be locked away in an asylum.
Nevertheless, Silas agrees that he will give Leena the medicine. In return, Leena must find the ghost of Percival Avon, the last lord of Weavingshaw—or lose her freedom to the Saint forever.
Result: a trip to Weavingshaw, a huge Gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere. Weavingshaw feels like a building like Mandalay, straight out of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, or perhaps Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, rising out of the mist on the moors.
I felt that the author does well in her creation of Weavingshaw as a creepy place, with Gothic elements that reminded me much of the monolithic houses of Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley or Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. It is as much of a character as our human protagonists.
The human characters themselves are generally pretty standard. Although they feel a little like something out of Dickensian melodrama they are perhaps a bit more moral than that of say Scott Lynch or Joe Abercrombie. We don’t entirely delve into the world of the Grimdark here, even when things get dark. Leena is a bright and intelligent young woman. determined to make the most of her bad lot and at the same time uphold her ideas of fairness and decency.
In the usual tradition of such novels, Silas is a shadowy male, enigmatic and ominously abrupt in his speech and manners that any self-respecting, unattached female would avoid - think Jane Austen's Heathcliff transposed into the dark brooding patron St. Silas.
So of course, it should not surprise any reader that the central plot revolves around Leena’s relationship with the Saint as she finds herself increasingly attracted to him. This creates a degree of tension, as too the fact that Leena has a deadline to meet in completing Silas’s task – failure to do so would mean spending the rest of her life in servitude to Silas.
All in all, Weavingshaw was a pleasing debut novel that seems to fit into the modern reimaging of the Fantasy genre and taps into many of the current popular tropes. It took a little while to get started, although it picked up pace after about 50 pages or so, until by the end when plot points move very quickly indeed.
It reads easily and well, and the romance is tastefully and well done, even if (as with a lot of the Romantasy material about) there is a lot of yearning on behalf of the two main characters. Not always a bad thing, but in a book of nearly 500 pages I think that you can have too much of a good thing.
I think that many will enjoy this book for those reasons, although as is de rigueur for many Fantasy books at the moment, this ends on a cliff-hanger, to be continued in the next (and at the time of typing, as yet unreleased) sequel. Anyone looking for an ending, happy or otherwise, will need to read further.
Mark Yon
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