The Unchosen Sister
Kindle Unlimited
A historical gothic about the people a house leaves behind.
Aldermere Hall has always taken a bride from the family that keeps it. In the autumn of 1733 it is Mary Hargrove's turn, and her sister Clarissa has come only to see her settled.
Clarissa has spent twenty-two years hiding a gift she never asked for. She can read the age of things: the year in a watch-spring, the season set into an iron hinge. At Aldermere the gift refuses to stay quiet. The house is older than its stones admit, and the family runs on rules nobody will name. The matriarch watches Clarissa the way you watch a door you haven't decided whether to open.
Then there is Edmund, the brother the cycle passed over — the one body in the house whose age Clarissa cannot read, the first silence her gift has ever given her.
As the household's machinery closes around Mary, Clarissa has to work out what she owes a house that has no use for her, and what kind of freedom is left to a woman it has decided it does not need.
The Unchosen Sister is the first companion novel to the Rootbound Bride series — a historical gothic about the people a house leaves behind. A complete story in its own right, and a doorway into the trilogy.
For readers of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sarah Waters, and T. Kingfisher. A slow-burn romance set in a house with its own designs on the family that keeps it.
- Published
- 23 June 2026
- Genre
- Historical gothic
