After a brilliant career in ceramics spent making things and breaking things, now it is Jay herself who has cracked. Recovering from a breakdown, she and her husband Simon move to the desolate edges of the Yorkshire moors, where they find and fall in love with the Two Houses: a crumbling Victorian property whose central rooms were supposedly so haunted that a previous owner had them cut out from the building entirely. But on uprooting their city life and moving to the tiny grey village of Hestle, Jay and Simon discover it's not only the Two Houses that seems to be haunted by an obscure past. It soon becomes increasingly clear that the villagers don't want them there at all - and when building work to make the two houses whole again starts, a discovery is made that will unearth decades-old secrets . . .