Publisher's Synopsis
"A great atmospheric storyteller... Her books are a real pleasure." KATE ATKINSON From the great May storm in 1778, when John Hadley and his sons slip the British blockade off the coast of Massachusetts, the lives of the inhabitants of the wooden farmhouse on the cape weave around each other, right up to the present. Young Isaac Hadley is more interested in his pet blackbird than in helping to build the house; and Violet, a century later, with her own ghostly bird, finds that it's easy enough to trick a learned man, though harder to catch one. By the 1950s, the farmhouse is part of a community of steady men and wayward boys, and women who make jam but still feel the ghostly breath of Coral Hadley. As a second century draws to a close, the house can barely hold all its ghosts - but the tragedies are not over...
