Bloomsbury presents Bone China by Laura Purcell, read by Laura Kirman.
'Du Maurier-tastic' GUARDIAN
'Deliciously sinister' HEAT
'A clever, creepy read' SUNDAY EXPRESS
Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft's family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken.
But Dr Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the same disease in the cliffs beneath his new Cornish home.
Forty years later, Hester Why arrives at Morvoren House to take up a position as nurse to the now partially paralysed and almost entirely mute Miss Pinecroft. Hester has fled to Cornwall to try and escape her past, but surrounded by superstitious staff enacting bizarre rituals, she soon discovers that her new home may be just as dangerous as her last-

Portrait

Laura Purcell is an award-winning former bookseller living in Colchester, Essex with her husband and pet guinea pigs. She is the author of five previous novels for Raven Books, among them The Silent Companions, which was a Radio 2 and Zoe Ball ITV Book Club pick, and The Shape of Darkness, winner of the inaugural Fingerprint Award for Historical Crime Book of the Year. Her short stories have been included in The Haunting Season and The Winter Spirits anthologies, which were both instant Sunday Times bestsellers. She also wrote 'Roanoke Falls', a dramatic podcast for Realm, working with John Carpenter and Sandy King Carpenter. Her latest novel The Whispering Muse was the 2023 winner of The Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award.