Cloven

By Sally Spedding

Little has changed in the picturesque village of Cold Firton, where evil has thrived unhindered for centuries.

In February 1830, surly Tomos Richards reluctantly takes his 14-year-old mute and crippled sister, along with his cattle drove, from Cardiganshire towards London, hoping to find a cure for her injuries. Siân’s journey is beset by danger and cruelty and, after much of the drove is lost in a bog, she takes her chance to run away. Alone save for her pony and her loyal dog, and desperate to return to Wales, she mistakenly arrives at Tripp’s Cottage in Nether Wapford, where cholera has just taken hold and strangers are viewed with deep suspicion.

Shifting to the present day, Ivan Browning, a 32-year-old pottery teacher, has escaped London to live in the same Tripp’s Cottage. There he begins to experience ghostly pleas for help . . . while unwittingly becoming the target of two wealthy local criminal gangs. For it seems his investigation into the cottage’s haunted history is about to uncover a gruesome mystery that others want to keep buried deep.

Born in Wales, Sally Spedding studied sculpture at college, and is still a practising and exhibiting artist. She has won awards for her poems and short stories, and Wringland was her first published novel. The author is married to a painter and lives in Northamptonshire, but writes at their home in the Pyrenees.