A macabre and chilling supernatural gothic horror about a group of teenagers cursed by a Victorian baby farmer, each to die on their 18th birthday from the Stoker Award shortlisted author of The Book of the Baku. Perfect for fans of Clay McLeod Chapman, The September House by Carissa Orlando and The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.
Flynn heads with her boyfriend, Jackson, and a group of their friends to spend the night in Temple Fall, a mysterious house up on the moors with a strange history. Breaking in for a night of drinking and teenage debauchery they instead find themselves trapped in a strange nightmare after a joke seance goes wrong. Suddenly forced into strange acts and behaviours outside their character, the tight-knit group starts to fall apart - and then Jackson falls to his death.
In the aftermath Flynn must confront the traumas of her childhood, her upbringing in captivity with her mother who suffered from crippling paranoia and OCD. As a foster child she has been forced to make her own place in the world, to forge a new family out of the few scraps of hope and compassion she has been offered in her life. And everywhere she looks she sees the ghostly figure of a Victorian woman, that no one else can see.
The woman that pushed Jackson.
Reeling from the tragedy the group find themselves split apart, each grieving and trying to survive on their own. But when they start to die, one-by-one, on the very second of their 18th birthday, Flynn must keep them all together to keep her found family alive. And she must dig into the lost secrets of her family past, to stop the curse being passed down to the next generation again. Rosanna Boyle studied Classical Civilisation at the University of Leeds, after which she worked in a variety of jobs – none of which had anything to do with her degree. Her debut, The Book of the Baku, will be published in 2021.
Rosanna lives in Leeds with her husband and three sons.
