Ashton Hall

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 secret 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. It is then that Hannah collides with Ashton Hall's dark history. Determined to figure out what led to the woman's imprisonment and death, Hannah begins to recreate the Ashton Hall of the distant past in all its vivid color and conflict, through the surviving remnants of everyday life: old ledgers showing what the woman's household spent on everything from tapestries and lace to music and medicine; lists of books checked out of Ashton Hall's library over decades; and the troubling letters and personal papers of the long-departed family. As her research draws her ever deeper into Ashton Hall's past, Hannah discovers a deadly rivalry. Now, while she struggles to reshape her own future, Hannah must confront what women throughout history have had to do to secure their independence and protect their children.

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.