The Draining of Coldharbor Farm
A Novel of Water and Iron

About this book:

In the gray, waterlogged wilderness of the Norfolk fens, where the sky melts into stagnant marsh and the land is slowly drowning, a lone Dutch engineer arrives with a leather trunk full of brass instruments and a radical ambition: to reshape not just the earth, but fate itself. Pieter van Leeuwen comes from a world where men have learned to tame the sea—and he has been summoned to Coldharbor Farm, a once-prosperous estate now half-submerged by silt, resentful tides, and the creeping rot of neglect. Against the whispered superstitions of the marshlanders and the quiet defiance of Katherine Hobart, a woman whose sharp eyes see more than she reveals, Pieter stakes everything on a windmill and an Archimedean screw—machines of iron and oak that might lift the water from the lowlands or drown them in disaster.

But the fens have their own guardians, and the water is not the only force that resists change. From the mud-choked channels to the cold hearth of the Hobart kitchen, *The Draining of Coldharbor Farm* weaves a tale of ambition, betrayal, and the relentless arithmetic of survival. As the spring tide rises and the old dikes begin to crack, Pieter must learn that some enemies are measured not in inches of fall per mile, but in the weight of human fear and the slow poison of ancient loyalty. For readers who love richly atmospheric historical fiction where the landscape itself becomes a character—and where the battle against nature is only the beginning of a deeper, darker struggle—this novel is a masterwork of tension and transformation, as haunting and unyielding as the waters it seeks to conquer.