In a vast, mysterious house, a family is reeling from its loss. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, mourn her absence. And Miranda, with her sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her family. She is slipping away from them. When one night she vanishes, the survivors are left to tell her story.

"Unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting" - Publishers Weekly

The Umbrella Tree tells the story of Helena Wolff, who grew up on a coffee farm in Kenya, together with her brother Horace. As an adult, she settled in an affluent Ireland, where her quiet and seemingly normal life in Wicklow is undermined by the tragedy and violence of her past. In this deep, yet often humourous novel, twists and turns culminate in a shocking and unexpected ending.

Cradle Cross in 1933 is a town in the heart of Black Country, England, still reeling from the Great War and dominated by a button factory in terminal decline. Into this exotically grim environment arrives a white-haired young woman from the coast named Isa Fly. Isa is a mysterious and magnetic presence who exerts a romantic pull on everyone she meets. Motherless, thirteen-year-old Ruby Tailor is instantly drawn to her, as is Captin, the proprietor of the local chip shop, a fifty-year-old bachelor and father figure to Ruby, and Truda Blick, the Oxford-educated spinster who’s inherited the failing button factory. As the reasons for Isa’s sudden appearance become less clear with each passing day, she is viewed with increasing suspicion by the tight-knit women of Cradle Cross who come to see her as the cause of the town’s accelerating misfortunes and ultimately fear her as a witch.

Anna Lawrence Pietroni, in her fiction debut, captures for the first time the dialect of Black Country, and the effect is utterly mesmerizing. Cradle Cross is a town out of time—battered by war and yet linked to a distant past, an isolated pocket of the country whose customs and views have remained intact since medieval times, where talismans protect loved ones and rituals can help wring away the grief of loss.

In her second novel, after her critically-acclaimed As Meat Loves Salt, Maria McCann returns to 17th Century England, where life is struggling to return to normal after the horrific tumult of the Civil War. In the village of Spadboro Jonathan Dymond, a 26-year old cider-maker who lives with his parents, has until now enjoyed a quiet, harmonious existence. As the novel opens, a letter arrives from his uncle with a desperate request to speak with his father. When his father returns from the visit the next day, all he can say is that Jonathan's uncle has died. Then Jonathan finds a fragment of the letter in the family orchard, with talk of inheritance and vengeance. He resolves to unravel the mystery at the heart of his family - a mystery which will eventually threaten the lives and happiness of Jonathan and all those he holds dear.