ABOUT
THE BOOK

After sending their only daughter off to boarding school, Cookson and Ellen Selway travel to London to escape their empty house. But their quiet hotel has other guests and Cookson, an escapist with an alcoholic history, is drawn into a series of encounters with the ghost of a young girl who died in a fall from the hotel sixty years earlier. As the shadowy rooms and characters of her life, and the nightmarish circumstances of her death, grow more real, Ellen looks on helplessly as her husband withdraws into a darkness whose inhabitants she cannot see or touch. With their marriage crumbling and the lives of those around them in danger, Selway dimly realises that he must relinquish the spirits to return to real life. But the consequences of his escape are far greater than he could ever imagine. Dennis McFarland is the author of two previous novels, one of which was The Music Room, a New York Times bestseller. He lives near Boston.