February is persecuting the townspeople. It has been winter for more than three hundred days. All forms of flight are banned and the children have started to disappear, taken from their beds in the middle of the night. The priests hang ominous sheets of parchment on the trees, signed 'February'. And somewhere on the outskirts of the town lives February himself, with the girl who smells of honey and smoke...

In short bursts of intensely poetic language, this beautifully strange and otherworldly first novel tells the story of the people in the town and their efforts to combat the mysterious spectre of February. Steeped in visual imagery, this is a hauntingly enigmatic modern fairy tale - in which nothing is as it seems.

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Thaddeus

We sat on the hill. We watched the flames inside the balloons heat the fabric to neon colours. The children played Prediction. They pointed to empty holes in the sky and waited. Something all the balloons lit up at once and produced the nightly umbrella effect over the town beneath whose buildings were filling with the sadness of February.

Nights like this will soon die, Selah whispered in my ear.

Days became cooler, clouds thickened. We sat on the hill. We watched the flames inside the balloons heat the fabric to neon colours.

Nights like this will soon die, said Bianca. She ran from the woods where she saw three children twisting the heads of owls.

Nights like this will soon die, said the butchers, marching down the hill.

We sat there for the last time to watch the balloons, the neon colours stitched in our minds.

Pigs shrieked and windows shattered across the town. A snout, massive and pink, traced the side of a balloon in its arc. The fabric stretched around the dark nostrils and stopped just before tearing, and it stayed there.

Still, the children stood in a line with their lanterns raised to watch the first snowfall of February cover the crop fields.

Selah lowered her head. Selah folded her hands in her lap. Selah looked at the backs of the children’s heads and saw ice form knots in their hair.

We can only pray, whispered Selah.

I looked at Selah and remembered the dandelions stuck in her teeth. I thought of a burning sun, an iceberg melting in her folded hands.