The Lock Keeper's Granddaughter

About this book:

The summer of 1976 bakes the Grand Union Canal into a cracked, relic-strewn trench, and at Lock Nine, the dropping water isn't just exposing rusted bicycles and mussel shells—it's dredging up a past the lock-keeper's family buried forty years deep. When nineteen-year-old Ruth hauls a silt-encrusted iron box from beneath the gate sill, she finds a stopped pocket watch, a railway button, and a photograph of her grandmother Evelyn beside a stranger whose face is a mirror of Ruth's own. The man is Frank Miller. The date is July 1939. And the grandfather in the portrait on the parlour wall shares nothing of his features.

As the drought tightens its grip and the canal traffic slows to a crawl, the three women of the lock house circle one another in a silence thicker than the stagnant water. Evelyn, carved from the same oak as the balance beams, insists the box is mere scrap to be returned to the depths. Clara, worn thin by years of holding the household together, flees the photograph with a terror she refuses to name. And Ruth, caught between the only history she's known and the face staring back from the mud, begins to understand that the locks don't just control water—they guard the secrets of everyone who ever passed through them.

With the heatwave breaking records and the reservoir levels critical, a charming young boatman named David Miller arrives on the cut, bearing a surname that makes Evelyn's cane strike the gravel a little harder. As the canal gives up its ghosts—ledgers fused into papier-mâché, letters rotting in floorboards, a cocoa tin hidden for a generation—Ruth must decide whether to be the lock-keeper her grandmother demands or the daughter who finally turns the windlass on a lifetime of lies. In a valley where the past is never truly past, the rising water will demand its due.