Lady Highlish

Published under a pseudonym, Lady Highlish is Hunwald's first novel. Conceived as a genuine diary, kept through the winter of 1862, this text was designed to conceal, within every page, a second meaning that only a second reading can uncover.

Scotland, 1862

Let me tell you what is never said in drawing rooms. Being a countess means nothing when the man you bury has made a field of ruins of you. You may believe that grief erases humiliation, that six feet of earth are enough to bury tyranny. But Greygory printed his cruelty so deeply into me that I wear it like a second skin, and that skin, no coffin can carry away.

From him, I inherit a secret he never breathed a word of: High Heather Castle, an estate lost in the heart of the Highlands. That name echoes within me like a forgotten melody.

I left London for these remote parts. And what I found at the end of the road was not peace, but a prison of eternal winter, of rock and gloom.

Within these walls, I try to survive, surrounded by Edna and Ramsay, my servants, my only allies in this place.

But something is prowling.

In the silences. In the walls. In the moor.

Then, there is this man, this vagrant who appeared in the storm…

When our eyes met, I understood that the fever which had torn away a piece of my life was not a mere lapse of the flesh, but perhaps a truth my heart refused to see.

Grief does not end with death, memory protects only by burying, and places sometimes keep secrets better than the living. This gothic novel draws the reader into a wintry Scotland of stone, mist and silence, where the voice of Lilith Highlish seeks to piece together what a year of forgetting has stolen from her, or perhaps what it has already taken.