What We Swallowed: A Novel of Secrets and Sisters

By Alexandra Briar

She doesn't drink. She hasn't in seven years. So how did she wake up next to a body with no memory of the night?

Nadia Hale has built a life on clarity. A million-pound wellness brand. A groundbreaking research project two weeks from launch. A reputation for composure that has held through every difficult thing she has ever carried - and she has carried more than anyone knows.

Then she wakes up at a luxury retreat on the Cornish coast, and her best friend is dead.

Her phone shows a text she doesn't remember sending. A witness places her at the scene. A bottle of wine sits empty on the table. And the investigating detective is watching her the way people watch someone they have already decided about.

Nadia does the only thing she knows how to do: she investigates. She works through the retreat's eleven guests one by one - the fraudulent financier, the ambitious influencer, the photographer with a secret, the publicist who has been quietly betraying her for months. Each of them is hiding something. None of them, she becomes increasingly certain, killed Clara.

Which means she might have.

What We Swallowed is a psychological mystery about the evidence we build against ourselves - and the silence we inherit from the people who love us most. It is a story about two sisters, one mother, and a secret that has been fifteen years in the keeping.

Some books you finish and move on. This one you finish and sit with.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GZTKWWYF
• ISBN13: 9798195811396
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"