Ashton Hall

An American woman and her son stumble upon the dark history of a rambling English manor house in this “masterful, riveting, and atmospheric” (Alka Joshi, author of The Henna Artist) novel from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Belfer.
 
“With vibrant prose, Lauren Belfer shepherds us through a centuries-old mystery and into a modern-day introspection on motherhood, marriage, and love.”—Georgia Hunter, New York Times bestselling author of We Were the Lucky Ones

When a close relative falls ill, Hannah Larson and her young son, Nicky, join him for the summer at Ashton Hall, a historic manor house outside Cambridge, England. A frustrated academic whose ambitions have been subsumed by the challenges of raising her beloved child, Hannah longs to escape her life in New York City, where her marriage has been upended by a recently discovered and devastating betrayal.

Soon after their arrival, ever-curious Nicky finds the skeletal remains of a woman walled into a forgotten part of the manor, and Hannah is pulled into an all-consuming quest for answers, Nicky close by her side. Working from clues in centuries-old ledgers showing what the woman’s household spent on everything from music to medicine; lists of books checked out of the library; and the troubling personal papers of the long-departed family, Hannah begins to recreate the Ashton Hall of the Elizabethan era in all its color and conflict. As the multilayered secrets of her own life begin to unravel, Hannah comes to realize that Ashton Hall’s women before her had lived not so different from her own, and she confronts what mothers throughout history have had to do to secure their independence and protect their children.

“Infused with the brooding, gothic atmosphere of Jane Eyre or Rebecca” (Melanie Benjamin, author of The Children’s Blizzard) and rich with female passion, strength, and ferocity across the ages, Ashton Hall is a novel that reveals how the most profound hauntings are within ourselves.

About The Author:

Lauren Belfer’s most recent novel, AND AFTER THE FIRE, received the inaugural Book Club Award of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards. Her next novel, ASHTON HALL, will be published on June 7, 2022.

Lauren's debut novel, CITY OF LIGHT, was a New York Times bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book. CITY OF LIGHT was also a bestseller in Great Britain, and it has been translated into six languages. Her second novel, A FIERCE RADIANCE, was named a Washington Post Best Novel, an NPR Best Mystery, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. In a four-star review, USA Today said that Belfer's third novel, AND AFTER THE FIRE, “swells with life’s great themes — love and death, family and faith — and the insistent, dark music of loss.”

Lauren grew up in Buffalo, New York, and she decided to become a writer when she was six years old. By the time she was in high school, her literary work was receiving rejection letters from all the best publications. After graduating from college, she worked as a file clerk at an art gallery, a paralegal at a law firm, an assistant photo editor at a newspaper, a fact-checker at magazines, and a researcher and associate producer on documentary films. Her first published short story was rejected forty-two times before it found an editor who loved it. Her second published story was rejected only twenty-seven times. She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and she lives in New York City.