Some stories are not written. They are buried — beneath church records with missing pages, beneath graves with no names, beneath two centuries of whispered warnings and locked doors in a village that learned, long ago, that some questions are safer left unasked.
For two hundred years, the village of Riverford has kept one rule above all others: do not enter the woods.
When Clara Hartwell arrives as her uncle's companion, she expects quiet village life and, perhaps, material for her next book. Instead she finds a house that watches her, a tower that appears and disappears at the edge of the tree line, and a woman in a black cloak who already knows her name.
The villagers say she is dangerous. They have said so for two hundred years.
But Clara has walked through memory and shadow, deep into what the Elden Woods have been keeping alive all this time — and what she finds is nothing like the story she was told. Because some women are not remembered as they lived. They are remembered as they were needed: dangerous, guilty, erased.
The Elden Woods is a haunting gothic debut about buried truth, historical erasure, and the courage it takes to rewrite a story that powerful people spent centuries trying to destroy.
The woods have always known the difference between a monster and a martyr. It simply waited for someone else to learn it too.
Clara intends to change that.