The Hollow Veil: When the dead learn to whisper back
When the dead learn to whisper back.
Prague, 1573. In a shuttered house by the river, a painter lays a circle of silver leaf a hand's breadth to one side of a young woman's head, speaks a name that no living mouth should know, and seals something inside the paint. She asks for only one thing in return: My name is mine.
Four and a half centuries later, art restorer Evelyn Halden opens a crate in her Prague studio and finds that same portrait looking back at her. The Maiden, Veiled. Its halo is in the wrong place. Its varnish is too fresh. And when the lights go down, it begins to whisper.
Then the call comes from England: her estranged father is dead, and the painting came from his house. It was Halden Manor's for more than a century, until he sent it to her with a sealed letter and a warning she doesn't understand: Don't look too long.
At the crumbling family manor in Wiltshire, the mirrors no longer keep time. Portraits turn their heads in the dark. Beneath the old studio lies a round stone room with no door, where her ancestor Margaret Halden once took something from a girl in Prague and used it to make her paintings breathe.
Now that breath is in Evelyn's veins. And it is spreading from glass to glass across London, wherever someone looks too long.
With a quiet solicitor who has no imagination and far too much courage, Evelyn must undo what her family stole before the city forgets its own face, and before she forgets hers.
A haunting, atmospheric gothic novel about inheritance, theft and memory, and the one thing a stolen soul never gave away: her name.
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