Safer then, to say nothing. To dare nothing. Visibility brought both possibility and danger, and Thora Lunde desired neither. She was a cautious person and having survived to the age of twenty-four by virtue of being overlooked, felt quite certain the future could disown her at any time.
THE PITCH
THE NIGHT MOTHER is a literary ghost story in the vein of Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch and the chilling psychological atmosphere of The Others.
Set on a blacked-out London terrace during the height of the Blitz, it follows isolated young housekeeper Thora, who steps into her late mother’s role maintaining the now-vacant Granville house, a home she was once banished from for claiming it was haunted.
Alone for the first time and desperate to escape her past, Thora discovers unprecedented freedoms in a city cloaked in blackout – and promise. But her fragile independence is soon disrupted when she becomes the reluctant guardian of three “undesirable” evacuees.
Bound by their shared stories of exile and survival, Thora begins to see herself in the children she’s sworn to protect. When one of them claims to communicate with the ghost of Thora’s troubled childhood, the nightly air raids threaten to destroy more than the tenuous foundations of Thora’s identity. As the walls of the Granville house tremor, stirring up her darkest secrets with the dust, Thora must confront the haunted memories buried in both the house – and herself, before they smother her and those she’s learnt to love.
ၴႅၴ Long listed for the Exeter Novel Prize as The Spinney