The Distant Hours

In the summer of 1992, a long-lost letter posted during the Second World War finally reaches Meredith Burchill, and her daughter Edie watches her mother dissolve into tears over its arrival. Edie, a young London book editor, knew almost nothing about the year her mother spent as a wartime evacuee — taken in as a child by the eccentric Blythe sisters at their crumbling ancestral home, Milderhurst Castle. When chance later brings Edie to the castle gates, she is drawn into its shadows and into the lives of the three sisters who still live there: the fierce twins Persephone and Seraphina, and their fragile younger half-sister Juniper.

The castle is the childhood home of Raymond Blythe, author of the beloved and unsettling children's classic The True History of the Mud Man, and its stones hold decades of buried secrets. As Edie pieces together what happened during one fateful night in 1941 — when Juniper waited for a lover who never came — she uncovers a story of thwarted love, sisterly duty, and a loss that has frozen the sisters in time.

Told across dual timelines, The Distant Hours is an atmospheric gothic mystery about the stories families tell and the ones they hide, the pull of the past, and how a single night can shape three lives forever.