First published 2014
Sam Lattimore falls hard for Elizabeth Church when they meet at a Halifax art gallery in the 1970s. Their marriage burns bright with passion and tenderness, but it ends abruptly when bellman Alfonse Padgett kills Elizabeth at the Essex Hotel. Sam's grief takes strange turns. He makes the mistake of selling his story to Istvakson, a Norwegian filmmaker who specializes in violent movies. This decision traps Sam in a psychological game with the director. Meanwhile, Sam begins seeing Elizabeth's spirit. She appears to him almost nightly, and they talk together while she arranges books on a small beach. What starts as grief-induced visions becomes something more real and mysterious. Sam must navigate his haunted new reality while dealing with the filmmaker's manipulations and the weight of his loss.
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, mystery, contemporary, paranormal, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: grief, haunting, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Essex Hotel, Halifax, Norway
Period: 1970s
255 pages · Hardcover · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Content warnings: mental-illness