The World Before Us

Haunted - and partly narrated - by the dead and forgotten, The World Before Us is a breathtakingly imaginative novel about the traces we leave behind us, what slips off the margins of history - and the possibility that we are less alone than we might think. Jane was fifteen when her life changed for ever. In the woods surrounding a Yorkshire country house, she took her eyes off the little girl she was minding and the girl slipped into the trees - never to be seen again. Now an adult, Jane is obsessed with another disappearance: that of a young woman who walked out of a Victorian lunatic asylum one day in 1877. As she pieces together moments in history, Jane uncovers a tangled story that has been buried for more than a century, and finally confronts her own past...