Embertide

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Something old lives in the water beneath Aylesbury. It has been there since before the town, before the church, before any name we have for deep time. And every seven years, during the ember days of late September, it requires acknowledgment.

Sarah Wickham arrives in Aylesbury to claim an inheritance she never knew she had: a house on a street that curves when it should run straight, left to her by a great-aunt she met exactly twice. What she finds inside are decades of careful notebooks, and a truth her family has kept for generations — the town's continued safety has been purchased in blood. Children's blood. One every seven years, chosen for their difference, their isolation, their dispensability.

Sarah refuses to continue the chain. She will find another way.

The spring accepts.

Embertide is a folk horror novella set in medieval Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where ancient contracts endure beneath modern tarmac and the body keeps its own kind of record. The horror isn't in what happens to Sarah. It's in what she becomes.

Third in Tamsin Peake's Short and Brutal series. For readers of Andrew Michael Hurley, Paul Tremblay, and Catriona Ward.