A new novel from Australia’s most beloved storyteller

Jesse Marley calls herself a realist; she’s all about the here and now. But in the month before Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding in 1981, all her certainties are blown aside by events she cannot control. First she finds out she’s adopted. Then she’s run down by a motorbike.

In a London hospital, temporarily unable to speak, she uses her left hand to write. But Jesse’s right-handed. And as if her fingers have a will of their own, she begins to draw places she’s never seen, people from another time—a castle, a man in medieval armour. And a woman’s face.

Rory Brandon, Jesse’s neurologist, is intrigued. Maybe his patient’s head trauma has brought out latent abilities. But wait. He knows the castle. He’s been there.

So begins an extraordinary journey across borders and beyond time, one that takes Jesse to Hundredfield, a stronghold built a thousand years ago by a brutal Norman warlord and passed down to the noble Dieudonné family, a clan honored and burdened with the task of protecting England’s dangerous northern border in the fourteenth century. Jesse holds the key to the castle’s many secrets and its connection to the mystical legend of the Lady of the Forest.

Somehow Hundredfield, with its history of darkness and light, of bloody battles won and lost, will help Jesse find her true lineage. In a world where the tales of old are just a heartbeat away, there are no accidents. There is only fate.