This haunting, dual-timeline, romantic suspense, set against the backdrop of Cornwall’s dramatic coastline, is a gripping story of love, legacy and loss and is Lorna Marlow’s second Cornish novel. Her first, Finding Home, was shortlisted for the Debut Novel of the Year 2026 by the Romantic Novelists Association.

Emily Foster has come to Cornwall to start again. In the old cottage at Gunwalloe, with the sea at her door and her past behind her, she hopes to rebuild a life shaken by betrayal. But the cottage is not quite the refuge she imagined. A lingering presence drifts through the house, bound to the land, the sea and an old injustice that reaches across the centuries.

At Penzance Museum, Emily, tasked with arranging an exhibition on witchcraft, reveals stories she cannot forget, of women swept away on a tide of suspicion by a world that feared what it could not control. And as the boundaries between her research and her home begin to blur, Emily realises the presence in her cottage is bound to the witch trials themselves, and to a tragedy within its walls that has been waiting for someone to listen.

Then there is Zac, the local carpenter, whose friendship offers Emily the possibility of a future she had stopped believing in. Yet Zac has secrets of his own, and as Tara, Emily’s assistant, grows resentful of Emily’s success, buried tensions begin to rise, with consequences none of them can escape.

As past and present converge, Emily must bring the truth to light and confront what can happen when the powerless are finally given a voice.

Some stories wait generations to be told, and some voices, once awakened, cannot be silenced again.