The Visitor

A haunting novel about the ghosts we can't outrun, from the bestselling author of The Imitator.

'Ghosts live in the sunshine too.'

For most of her adult life, Laura has lived in the UK, her ties to her Brisbane upbringing all but severed. When her parents, Bruce and Eliza, perish in mysterious circumstances in the Queensland outback, she and her family must return to settle their affairs and sell the now-dilapidated house of her childhood.

But as the renovations progress, Laura starts to experience strange happenings in the house that cannot be explained away. Is it haunted? Or is the woman next door, who had inveigled her way into Bruce and Eliza's lives, testing her as she copes with the grief and trauma of their deaths?

Fourteen-year-old Tilly, alarmed by her mother's increasingly erratic behaviour, is drawn into the disturbing atmosphere of the house as the distance between them grows. And with both of them seeing things, Laura realises that unless she unearths what drove her parents to flee the house, they will never be free of the past.

The Visitor is a compelling exploration of intergenerational trauma, dispossession and the ghosts we can't outrun, from the bestselling author of The Imitator.

'A masterfully wrought study of expatriate hysteria and disorientation. A riveting tale of Australian Gothic in which the fetid heat of subtropical Brisbane and the harsh Antipodean sunlight can be made to seem as sinister as the dark.' AMANDA LOHREY, author of The Labyrinth and The Conversion

'A suspenseful, atmospheric and deliciously Gothic tale that is genuinely impossible to put down.' ELIZA HENRY-JONES, author of Salt and Skin