Ashton Hall

January 1, 2022

The Edgar-nominated Bayard follows up Courting Mr. Lincoln with Jackie & Me, which reimagines Jacqueline Bouvier meeting Jack Kennedy and, as they approach marriage, slowly realizing that she's being polished as the perfect political wife. The New York Times best-selling, multi-award-winning Belfer introduces us to disappointed academic Hannah Larson, who travels to historic Ashton Hall to tend a relative and begins reconstructing events there during the Elizabethan era after her neurodivegent young son, Nicky, discovers a skeleton in the walls. Drawing on ancient texts and modern archaeology to unearth a trans woman's story beneath The Iliad, Deane's Wrath Goddess Sing reveals an Achilles living as a woman with the transgender priestesses of Great Mother Aphrodite and refusing Odysseus's call to fight until given the body of a woman by Athena and heading into battle to confront an immortal, viciously implacable Helen. From Ford, the author of the mega-best-selling Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, The Many Daughters of Afong May tells the story of Dorothy Moy, who turns her often painful dissociative mental-health crises into art; when her daughter begins revealing similar tendencies, Dorothy seeks to waylay the consequences of inherited trauma by engaging in a radical therapy that connects her with brave women ancestors (125,000-copy first printing). In debuter Pook's Moonlight and the Pearler's Daughter, set in late 1800s Australia, young Englishwoman Eliza Brightwell sets off to find her eccentric father when the pearl-fishing boat he captains returns to port without him (60,000-copy first printing). In Pulley's Cold War-set The Half-Life of Valery K, when former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov is removed from the Gulag and asked to study the effects of radiation in a mysterious town housing nuclear reactors, he's truly worried about how much radiation there is (60,000-copy first printing). In New York Times best-selling author Rimmer's latest, The German Wife of a Nazi scientist pardoned and put to work in the start-up U.S. space program doesn't feel at home among the other NASA wives and confides her husband's SS past to exactly the wrong person (200,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing).

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April 18, 2022
In the well-crafted latest from Belfer (And After the Fire), Manhattan art historian Hannah Larson puts her career on hold to give her son, Nicky, who suffers from violent outbursts, the constant care he needs. When Hannah’s uncle invites her and Nicky to spend the summer in England, she’s just discovered that her husband, Kevin, is having an affair, and welcomes the respite from marital tensions. Hannah and nine-year-old Nicky are fascinated by Ashton Hall, the ancient Cambridgeshire manor in which her uncle leases an apartment. Exploring an abandoned wing, Nicky discovers a skeleton in a room that’s walled up except for a single small opening. The body is identified as that of Isabella Cresham, a late–16th-century member of the family that once owned the Hall, and some of the artifacts found nearby suggest that Isabella was a Catholic despite her era’s brutal religious strictures. Hannah, herself feeling trapped due to financial dependence on Kevin, who refuses to end his affair, is drawn to Isabella’s story. As she gleans details of Isabella’s life from sketchbooks and ledgers found in another room in the house, she struggles to chart her own future. Without slipping into country house clichés or simplistic parallels, Belfer offers a nuanced exploration of the ways women’s lives are constricted. Anglophiles and Tudor history buffs will enjoy this immersive tale.

May 1, 2022
A woman's attempts to uncover an archaeological mystery lead to a bigger discovery: herself. Hannah Larson and her 9-year-old son, Nicky, have packed up their Upper West Side bags and moved into Ashton Hall, a stately manor near Cambridge, England. They were intending to keep Christopher, Hannah's honorary uncle, company while he undergoes cancer treatment, but unbeknownst to Hannah, he has made other plans to get care in New York City. Thus Hannah has Christopher's apartment to herself, as well as the time and space to work on her long-put-aside dissertation and to contemplate her husband's betrayals. That is until Nicky, a quirky child with troubling outbursts of violence, makes a shocking discovery: Hidden away in an enclosed room in the walls of Ashton Hall is a redheaded skeleton. A team of archaeologists descend on the manor to learn more about the skeleton, whom they discover lived in the 1500s and is named Isabella Cresham: "Isabella Cresham has never been a ghost, haunting us," one of the manor's other residents says to Hannah. "Tells you something about ghosts. If you don't fear their presence, they leave you alone. We'll see if she starts haunting us now." Hannah, clearly haunted from the moment she lays eyes on Isabella, begins to see parallels between their lives as she deals with the nagging question: Did Isabella choose this life, or was she locked away? Hannah pours over Isabella's sketchbooks and letters, piecing together Isabella's life while interweaving her own anxieties and dreams into Isabella's story. The first third of the book drags, and somehow the discovery of a skeleton in a hidden room is the least compelling part of the entire novel. That said, its strength comes from the archaeological details (did you know that the pigment that creates red hair is the slowest to break down?) as well as the grace and attention given to both Hannah and Isabella--two women separated by hundreds of years but bound by a common humanity. A touching story about the themes that resonate through centuries.

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May 1, 2022
Belfer's (And After the Fire, 2016) first fully contemporary work may seem a departure for the acclaimed historical novelist, but she hasn't left the past behind. Her exquisitely illuminated story offers the vicarious indulgence of a stay at an English country house combined with an Elizabethan-era mystery and a meditation on women's age-old struggles between independence and motherhood. Circumstances involving a beloved, ill relative bring American Hannah Larson and her neurodivergent nine-year-old son, Nicky, to Ashton Hall, near Cambridge. Exploring the manor's long-abandoned upper floors, Nicky discovers a woman's skeleton. She had been sealed into her room, alongside a prie-dieu or prayer desk, books, and other comforts. Was she imprisoned, or had she lived there willingly? This isn't a standard Gothic tale of suspense; there are no supernatural elements. But this mystery does haunt Hannah. While contemplating her husband's infidelity and her lack of financial autonomy and grappling with Nicky's difficult behavior, Hannah reassembles the woman's life and times via centuries-old letters, household accounts, and library records with the help of new friends. Belfer shows how history is a tangibly close presence.

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