If you were drawn to how Maria, holidaying in Lyme Regis, senses Harriet’s lingering presence in the house and along the fossil-strewn shore, you’ll love how Tom slips into a garden that exists only at night to befriend Hatty. The clock striking thirteen, Tom stepping from a drab flat into a lush, vanished garden, and the way Hatty seems both present and out of reach mirror Maria’s eerie, tender discoveries about Harriet. Like Maria piecing together the past from subtle echoes, Tom uncovers Hatty’s life across shifting seasons—gentle, haunting, and deeply humane.

Maria’s sensitive attunement to Harriet’s life in the same house finds a kindred echo in Charlotte, who goes to sleep at boarding school and wakes in 1918 as another girl, Clare. Where Maria listens for Harriet in rooms and along the Cobb, Charlotte must navigate friendships, family, and war-time fears while trying to keep both lives intact. The emotional puzzle—who am I, and what debt do I owe the past?—intensifies as Charlotte faces choices that could strand her, much as Maria fears what really happened to Harriet.

If you loved Maria’s quiet days in a seaside house, feeling Harriet’s presence in its corridors and garden paths, Tolly’s winter visit to Green Knowe will feel instantly familiar. He explores candlelit halls, listens to whispers in draughty rooms, and befriends the ghost-children Toby, Alexander, and Linnet—companions as gentle and tangible as Harriet’s echoes. The story lingers in small, domestic moments—music, toys, stories—capturing the same intimate hush and sense that the house itself remembers.

Maria’s finely tuned perceptions—hearing and feeling Harriet’s Victorian imprint—resonate with Marianne, whose drawings become a place she can enter at night. What starts as a sketch turns into a landscape dotted with ominous, watchful stones and a house holding a sick boy she must help. Like Maria assembling Harriet’s story from traces, Marianne learns how her thoughts shape the world she steps into, and how courage and empathy can change it. It’s eerie, symbolic, and deeply personal.

As Maria pieces together Harriet’s fate from the house and shoreline in Lyme Regis, Minty discovers that a garden sundial can carry her to other eras, where she meets Tom and Sarah—children bound by injustices time has tried to bury. The way Minty deciphers clues in statues, rooms, and whispered stories mirrors Maria’s gentle sleuthing. Both tales build slowly to a moving release, turning a holiday into a tender investigation of what happened to the children who came before.