Amazon (print)Kindle



Amazon Bookshop

Moira stood in the sunroom of Glenmirror manor looking out over the sea. The name of the room—like the name of the manor itself—was optimistic to the point of irony; the world outside seemed always a grayscale nightmare. Dark gray clouds scudded across a minimally lighter gray sky over the deep gray swells of the sea. Or ocean. Just which body of water Glenmirror overlooked from its slate-gray bluff was one of many details she could never quite put her finger on. Her memories were as insubstantial as the soft gray fogs, fed by sea and moor, that often billowed around the mansion. At those times, with no other landscape feature visible, Glenmirror appeared as a castle floating atop the clouds, a surreal vision that may as well have been reality, for the mansion, even on the ground, was just as cloistered and inescapable.
       Feeling a pang of hunger, she decided on having tea and scones, although the time of day was as elusive as everything else in Glenmirror. How many days or weeks she’d been the sole occupant of the creaky old manor was another unknown. In a way it felt like she’d always been there, but she had a vague impression that she had only resided in the manor as an adult. She thought that she was in her late twenties, due to a dim sense of having attended university for several years before plunging headlong into some arcane career, but any specific line items of her curriculum vitae, of where she might have been before Glenmirror, were as nebulous as a dream. The more she tried to peer into these voids in her thoughts, the more oppressive the mansion felt, and she was left wondering how she could ever find her way out of this place. . . .