About this book:

At the edge of a mist-choked canal in 1623, lock-keeper Elias Thorne tends his sluice gates with the devotion of a man who believes the world still turns beyond the reeds. But the barges have stopped coming. The village lights have gone out. And his son Thomas—drowned three winters past—still sits by the water, unchanged, unaging, whispering truths Elias refuses to hear.

As the seasons collapse into a single endless autumn, Elias's meticulous ledgers turn blank, his pocket watch vanishes into silt, and the lock-house rots around him in real time. Something ancient stirs in the deep chamber of the Reach, calling up memories weighted with lead and regret. To face it, Elias must confront the bargain he made with the water—and decide whether a father's love is a chain or a key.

*The Lock-Keeper of Hollow Reach* is a haunting, lyrical descent into the space between grief and acceptance, where duty becomes a prison and the past refuses to stay submerged. For readers who loved *The Turn of the Screw* and *The Buried Giant*, this is historical fiction that breathes like a ghost story—and lingers like cold water on the skin.