**Shortlisted 2017 QLD Literary Awards for Fiction**

**Shortlisted for the 2017 Readings New Australian Fiction Award**

From the bestselling author of the multi-award-winning Burial Rites.

"Lyrical and unsettling ... A literary novel with the pace and tension of a thriller, Hannah Kent takes us on a frightening journey towards an unspeakable tragedy. I am in awe of Kent's gifts as a storyteller." Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train

"a thoroughly engrossing entre into the macabre nature of a vanished society, its virtues and its follies and its lethal impulses." Thomas Keneally, winner of the Booker Prize

"Hannah Kent's much-anticipated second novel is a thoroughly atmospheric and involving read" Books and PublishingIn the year 1825, in a remote valley lying between the mountains of south-west Ireland, three women are brought together by strange and troubling events. Nóra Leahy has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year, and is now burdened with the care of her four-year-old grandson: a boy who suffers from a mysterious malady and can neither walk nor speak.

Unable to care for the child alone, Nóra hires a servant girl, Mary, who soon hears whispers in the valley about the blasted creature causing grief to fall on the widow's house. Alone, hedged in by rumour, Mary and her mistress seek out the only person who might be able to help Micheál. For although her neighbours are wary of her, it is said that Nance Roche has the knowledge. That she consorts with Them, the Good People. And that only she can return those whom they have taken ...