The Slate House of Snowdonia

Slate House stands at the head of a valley above Llan Ffestiniog, built from the same blue-grey stone the quarrymen cut out of the mountain behind it. The house has been waiting a long time, and it keeps a record of everyone it has held. Mererid Pugh inherits it from a great-uncle she barely knew. No explanation. No warmth. Only a postscript in a stranger's hand: The house has been waiting. She came to sort an estate, clear a property, and get back to a life she understands. Instead she finds a valley shaped by quarry work and grief, a chapel with an offering left in its porch, a locked room at the end of the landing, and neighbours who offer welcome and then hold their distance. Around her story the valley tells its own. A researcher catalogues the estate and finds her mother's name on the deed. A farmer's daughter goes down into her grandmother's cellar and reads what is written on the walls. Two sisters watch three lights move along a closed path on the ridge. A woman named Mererid has been inheriting this house for a hundred years, and she is not always the same woman. A linked gothic of one house and one valley, told in the voices of the people it keeps. Come for the atmosphere. Stay for the slow, relentless turn of the screw.