The Borrowed Child

Massachusetts, 1840.

Thomas Whitcomb has already buried more of his family than any man should have to. A widowed carpenter raising his young son Benjamin, he has built a modest, dependable existence in the small town of Alderfield. His days are filled with work, familiar neighbours, and the ordinary demands of fatherhood. It is a life held together by routine, affection, and the memories of those he has lost.

Then, on a bitter winter night, a frightened little girl knocks at his door.

Thomas offers her shelter. By morning, she has disappeared. But when she returns, something impossible has happened. The townspeople know her as Clara Whitcomb, Thomas's daughter. Benjamin remembers growing up with his older sister. There are clothes in the house, possessions in the bedrooms, and years of shared memories that Thomas knows cannot be real.

Yet Clara is no sinister apparition. She is a warm, sometimes difficult, thoroughly ordinary child who wants only to be loved. As Thomas finds himself increasingly attached to her, the distinction between the family he remembers and the family everyone else insists has always existed becomes harder to maintain.

Meanwhile, a newcomer named Susannah Reed begins making a life in Alderfield. Intelligent, capable and strangely compelling, she finds work, makes friends and gradually becomes part of Thomas's household. Her presence offers the possibility of happiness he had long since abandoned.

But Alderfield has secrets older than anyone living there.

Nearly two centuries earlier, in a settlement governed by religious conviction and growing suspicion, a mother and daughter became caught in a tragedy that the community would eventually struggle to remember. Now, old records, forgotten burial places and unsettling coincidences suggest that something from that vanished world has found its way into Thomas's life.

And the closer he comes to understanding what happened, the more he fears what the truth might cost him.

The Borrowed Child is an atmospheric historical Gothic horror novel about the families we make, the people we mourn, and the unsettling possibility that something lost might return to us wearing a familiar face.