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A novel of buried secrets and the people who hide them, from the author of These Dividing Walls.

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´Superbly written and utterly gripping´ Daily Mail

After an acclaimed career in ceramics, Jay herself has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband Simon move to the desolate edges of the north of England, where they find and fall in love with the Two Houses: a crumbling property whose central rooms were supposedly so haunted that a previous owner had them cut out from the building entirely.

But on uprooting their city life and moving to the sheltered grey village of Hestle, Jay and Simon discover it´s not only the Two Houses that seems to be haunted by an obscure past. It becomes increasingly clear that the villagers don´t want them there at all - and when building work to make the two houses whole again starts, a discovery is made that will unearth decades-old secrets . . .

But who in this village has been hiding them?

´Atmospheric with a wonderful cast of characters that prove the depth of Cooper´s empathy and talent. Eerie, evocative and captivating . . . A total triumph.´ Tor Udall, author of A Thousand Paper Birds

Praise for These Dividing Walls:

´Beautifully written´ Prima

´Unforgettable´ Hannah Rothschild

´Confident and brilliant´ Lisa O´Donnell

´Fine writing . . . Cooper´s expertly realised characters, both sympathetic and not, have stories interwoven with aplomb´ Daily Mail

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Superbly written and utterly gripping Daily Mail

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Cooper, Fran
Fran Cooper grew up in London before reading English at Cambridge and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She spent three years in Paris writing a PhD about travelling eighteenth-century artists, and currently works in the curatorial department of a London museum. These Dividing Walls is her first novel.

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