THE WRITING ON THE WALL

Haunted house. Haunted women. Haunted hills. Wetherell's literary fiction with a mystery at its center will appeal to fans of Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd.

When Vera decides to travel to an old house in the New England countryside for a month-long escape from some devastating news about her daughter, Cassie, she has no idea her life is about to change forever. It begins innocently enough—peeling the old wallpaper from the walls as a favor to the house’s owner. What she discovers underneath—written in India ink on the very walls of the house by a woman named Beth, in 1919—is the beginning of the reader’s unsettling crossing into the unknown world underneath the paper. THE WRITING ON THE WALL is a brilliantly realized journey into the connected lives of three women whose stories span a century, linked by the house they all briefly inhabit, and by the tragedies they've had to endure. THE WRITING ON THE WALL is about stories that can't be told, but must be told—about secrets that can't be shared, but must be shared—and the surprising ways people find to confront the truth. Walter D. Wetherell (born 1948) is an American writer who has published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction under the name W. D. Wetherell. His most recent books are Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land (University of Nebraska Press, 2009) and Hills Like White Hills: Stories (Southern Methodist University Press, 2009). His short stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, Tri-Quarterly,Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Breadloaf Quarterly, Atlantic, Southern Review, Colorado Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Graffiti. He has also written essays and travel pieces for The New York Times, the Boston Review, and other periodicals.