A post-mortem photographer unearths dark secrets from the past that may
hold the key to his future in this "sensual, twisting gothic tale...in
the tradition of A.S. Byatt's Possession, Diane Setterfield's The
Thirteenth Tale, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights" (BookPage).All
love stories are ghost stories in disguise. "This one happily succeeds
at both" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). When famed Byronesque poet
Hugh de Bonne is discovered dead in his bath one morning, his cousin
Robert Highstead, a post-mortem photographer, is charged with a simple
task: transport Hugh's remains for burial in a chapel. This chapel, a
stained-glass folly set on the moors, was built by de Bonne sixteen
years earlier to house the remains of his beloved wife and muse, Ada.
Since then, the chapel has been locked and abandoned, a pilgrimage site
for the rabid fans of de Bonne's last book, The Lost History of Dreams.
However, Ada's grief-stricken niece refuses to open the glass chapel for
Robert unless he agrees to her bargain: before he can lay Hugh to rest,
Robert must record Isabelle's story of Ada and Hugh's ill-fated marriage
over the course of five nights. As the mystery of Ada and Hugh's
relationship unfolds, so too does the secret behind Robert's own
marriage--including that of his fragile wife, Sida, who has not been the
same since a tragic accident three years earlier and the origins of his
morbid profession that has him seeing things he shouldn't...things from
beyond the grave. Blurring the line between the past and the present,
truth and fiction, and ultimately, life and death, The Lost History of
Dreams is "a surrealist, haunting tale of suspense where every
prediction turns out to be merely a step toward a bigger reveal"
(Booklist).
