Publisher's Synopsis
When a close relative falls ill, Hannah Larson and her young son, Nicky, join him for the summer at Ashton Hall, an historic manor house outside Cambridge, England. A frustrated academic whose ambitions have been subsumed by the pressing needs of her beloved, neurodiverse child, Hannah longs to escape her life in New York City, where she recently stumbled upon a devastating lie at the heart of her marriage. Hannah and Nicky settle happily into their new surroundings. But not long after their arrival, fearless, ever-curious Nicky, in a chilling encounter, finds the skeletal remains of a woman who had been walled into a forgotten part of the manor centuries earlier. Determined to figure out what led to her imprisonment and death, Hannah begins to recreate the Ashton Hall of the Elizabethan era in all its vivid colour and conflict, through the surviving remnants of everyday life: old ledgers showing what the woman's household spent on everything from music to medicine; lists of books checked out of the library; and the troubling personal papers of the long-departed family. As the multilayered secrets of her own life begin to unravel, Hannah comes to realise that the restraints governing the lives of Ashton Hall's women before her were not so different from her own, and she confronts what mothers and daughters throughout history have had to do, often covertly, to secure their independence and protect their children. In the tradition of The Weight of Ink and The Lost Apothecary, and rich with female passion, strength, and ferocity across the centuries, Ashton Hall is a novel that reveals how the most profound hauntings are within ourselves.
