What the Bones Know by Kirstyn McDermott

A child's bones, a lost girl, a mind adrift - sometimes what is lost comes back to haunt you...from an award-winning author comes a contemporary gothic tale of guilt, grief and redemption.

In the village of Kiln Creek in the Victorian Highlands, a ghost gum falls in a storm. Tangled in its roots are the bones of a small child and the tattered remains of her clothing, including a pair of bright-red sneakers.

Single mum Jude Mees is in her early forties and struggling to get her business off the ground while raising her ten-year-old daughter, Katie, and managing a fractious relationship with her controlling ex-husband. But when Jude learns that her mother, Nance, who still lives alone on the family property at Kiln Creek, is showing troubling signs of dementia, she has no option other than to return and check on her.

And indeed, all is not well at the farm. Nance is slowly drifting off into her own world, and there are other disturbing occurrences. Strange smells, inexplicably wet footprints, a voice in the night. As her daughter starts to sleepwalk and Jude's nightmares take over her days, she begins to wonder whether her imagination is out of control or if something more sinister is happening ...

A taut, claustrophobic exploration of what it means to be haunted - by our past, by fractured relationships, by a place we thought we knew and by our own unreliable memories.