Historical
Fiction Virtual Blog Tours Presents…
The
Lost History of Dreams
By Kris
Waldherr
A post-mortem photographer
unearths dark secrets of the past that may hold the key to his future, in this
captivating debut novel in the gothic tradition of Wuthering Heights and The Thirteenth Tale.
All love stories are ghost stories in
disguise.
When
famed Byronesque poet Hugh de Bonne is discovered dead of a heart attack in his
bath one morning, his cousin Robert Highstead, a historian turned post-mortem
photographer, is charged with a simple task: transport Hugh’s remains for
burial in a chapel. This chapel, a stained glass folly set on the moors of
Shropshire, was built by de Bonne sixteen years earlier to house the remains of
his beloved wife and muse, Ada. Since then, the chapel has been locked and
abandoned, a pilgrimage site for the rabid fans of de Bonne’s last book, The Lost History of Dreams.
However, Ada’s grief-stricken niece
refuses to open the glass chapel for Robert unless he agrees to her bargain:
before he can lay Hugh to rest, Robert must record Isabelle’s story of Ada and
Hugh’s ill-fated marriage over the course of five nights.
As the mystery of Ada and Hugh’s
relationship unfolds, so does the secret behind Robert’s own marriage—including
that of his fragile wife, Sida, who has not been the same since the tragic
accident three years ago, and the origins of his own morbid profession that has
him seeing things he shouldn’t—things from beyond the grave.
Kris Waldherr effortlessly spins a
sweeping and atmospheric gothic mystery about love and loss that blurs the line
between the past and the present, truth and fiction, and ultimately, life and
death.
Praise for The Lost History
of Dreams
“Scheherazade-like …
haunting… Waldherr writes that ‘love stories are ghost stories in disguise.’
This one, happily, succeeds as both.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred
review)
“An unexpected delight that
grows steadily more compelling as its pages fly by.”
Booklist
“A sensual, twisting gothic
tale that embraces Victorian superstition much in the tradition of A.S. Byatt’s
Possession, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale and Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights.”
BookPage
AMAZON • BARNES AND
NOBLE •
BOOKS-A-MILLION • INDIEBOUND
Kris
Waldherr
Kris Waldherr is an
award-winning author, illustrator, and designer. She is a member of the
Historical Novel Society, and her fiction has been awarded with fellowships by
the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts and a reading grant by Poets &
Writers.
Kris
Waldherr works and lives in Brooklyn in a Victorian-era house with her husband,
the anthropologist-curator Thomas Ross Miller, and their young daughter.
Ooooooo... this is really intriguing! Thanks for sharing!
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