In Her Own Hand

Twice a day, the road to Saltmere House disappears beneath the sea. Nina Sefton drives across it anyway.

She's a ghostwriter — broke, invisible, and extraordinarily good at not being noticed. She's spent a whole career putting words in other people's mouths and her name on nothing. So when Dame Cordelia Frayne, Britain's most beloved novelist and the grandest old woman of English letters, summons her to a remote house on a Cornish headland to write the memoir the nation has waited forty years for, Nina says yes before she reads the small print. The fee is impossible. The access is total. It is, she tells herself, the chance of a lifetime.

But Saltmere House stands on a spit of land the tide seals off morning and evening, and the dazzling life Nina is asked to shape has seams. Dates that refuse to meet. Charming anecdotes with the dead tucked quietly beneath them. A housekeeper who fences off the boathouse before Nina has crossed the threshold, and takes her phone at the door — for safekeeping. And, threaded through it all, the ghostwriter who began this very book a year ago, handed over her own phone on these same steps, and was never seen again.

As the water closes the road behind her and a gale gathers out in the Atlantic, Nina begins to understand the truth of her commission. She was not hired to record a life. She was hired to end one.

Told in a voice as precise and disarming as its narrator — a woman who has made a home of doing one thing while being seen to do another — In Her Own Hand is a taut, atmospheric thriller about secrets, survival, and who gets to decide the story we're all left believing.

The tide is turning. The glass is falling. And Nina Sefton has never, whatever else is true of her, been a sensible woman.

Turn the page — before the water does.