Jacket for 'The Hidden People'

Publishers

UK - Quercus

The Hidden People

By Alison Littlewood

Published Oct 2016

Pretty Lizzie Higgs is gone, burned to death on her own hearth.

But was she really a fairy changeling, stolen away by the Hidden People under the Hill, as her husband insists?

Albie Mirralls met his cousin Lizzie only once, at the Great Exhibition in 1851, when she enchanted him under the grand glass and iron arches of the Crystal Palace. Determined to unravel the lies that surround her murder, he leaves his young wife in London and travels to the Yorkshire village where his cousin lived. Halfoak may look picture-perfect in the blowsy, sundrenched days of high summer, but it’s steeped in superstition and older, darker beliefs.

Albie is a modern man, a rational man of science, but as he begins to dig into Lizzie’s death, he discovers far more than he could ever have imagined, for in this place where the old holds sway and the Hidden People supposedly roam, answers are slippery and further tragedy is just half a step away.