The Silent Companions

Chosen for the Zoe Ball Book Club

Inspired by the work of Shirley Jackson and Susan Hill and set in a crumbling country mansion, The Silent Companions is an unsettling gothic ghost story to send a shiver down the spine...

She pulled a page towards her. In the gloom she saw a void of white, waiting for her words. She swallowed the pain in her throat. How could she relive it? How could she bring herself to do it to them, all over again?She peered into the blank page, trying to see, somewhere in its vast expanse of nothing, that other woman from long ago.

Newly married, newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge.

With her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband's awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks.

For inside her new home lies a locked room, and beyond that door lies a two-hundred-year-old diary and a deeply unsettling painted wooden figure - a Silent Companion - that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself...

'Layering on the dark and creepy, this intriguingly plotted novel is the full-blown Gothic, maintaining throughout an unsettling claustrophobic atmosphere mixed with some unusual historical detail' - Daily Mail