Description
“Murray’s latest novel, set in crumbling postwar England, brings a 21st-century sensibility to a haunted Victorian house. Sugar Hall is host to themes of slavery, migration, exploitation, and history’s habit of updating its uglier productions with new actors and costumes.” – David MitchellEaster 1955. As Britain waits for a hanging, Dieter Sugar finds a boy in the red gardens of Sugar Hall: a boy who wears a silver collar. In the great house, Dieter’s mother, Lilia, scrapes the rust from the locks, the ice from the windows and battles with her own ghosts. But there are pasts hiding with the moths and rats that Lilia cannot remove so easily. Sugar Hall holds a secret: a history that has been buried but not forgotten.Based on the haunting stories of Littledean Hall in the Forest of Dean, this is a superbly spine tingling tale, and the perfect accompaniment for dark nights. Selected by David Mitchell as one of his top six ghost stories.
About the Author
Tiffany Murray grew up in Wales. She studied at New York University and the University of East Anglia, where she gained her doctorate and taught. Her first novel, Happy Accidents (2005), is the coming-of-age tale of 11-year-old Kate Happy, set on a rural farm on the Welsh-English border, and has drawn comparison with Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. Her second novel, Diamond Star Halo (2010), tells the story of Halo Llewelyn and her unconventional family who run a recording studio in rural Wales. It is a story of first love and rock n’ roll and drew comparisons with Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle. Both novels were shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Guardian critics selected Diamond Star Halo as one of the best of the fiction year, 2010. Murray has had short fiction and non-fiction published in various magazines and collections, and features in national newspapers including The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian. In 2003 she edited with Helon Habila Once upon a time in the Pretext series for Norwich Pen \\u0026 Inc. She teaches creative writing for adults and schools, at The National Writers’ Centre for Wales, and for the Arvon Foundation, and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glamorgan. Tiffany lives in Wales and Portugal.
