The Drowned Bells
When the water goes down, the past comes up.
In 1958, the village of Hollinsdale was drowned to make a reservoir. Its families were moved to new council houses in the town on the hill. Its church tower was left standing in the dark. And the bells of St Oswin's, the Water Board said, had been taken down months before.
Sixty-eight years later, the hottest summer on record drains the reservoir dry. The walls, the lane and the broken tower rise out of the cracked grey mud, and Margaret Ashworth, seventy-eight years old and a retired schoolteacher, comes home for the first time since she was ten.
On her first night back she hears a bell ringing beneath the mud. One low stroke, at ten past three in the morning.
Peg knows that bell. She knows why it rings. For sixty-eight years she has kept a promise she made to her little sister, and a lie she told the day the lorries came. Now an old bell-ringer in a care home is begging to speak to her before the rain, a young hydrologist has found a site engineer's diary that should never have survived, and every night the bell rings a little louder.
The storm is coming. When it breaks, Hollinsdale will go back under the water for good, and whatever is waiting in the tower will be lost with it.
The Drowned Bells is a haunting, tender ghost story about guilt and grief, about the promises children make, and about the places we try to bury so that we never have to go back.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
