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The Visitor

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The Visitor

By: Rebecca Starford
Narrated by: Lucy Moir
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About this listen

'Ghosts live in the sunshine too.'

For most of her adult life, Laura has lived in the UK, her ties to her Brisbane upbringing all but severed. When her parents, Bruce and Eliza, perish in mysterious circumstances in the Queensland outback, she and her family must return to settle their affairs and sell the now-dilapidated house of her childhood.

But as the renovations progress, Laura starts to experience strange happenings in the house that cannot be explained away. Is it haunted? Or is the woman next door, who had inveigled her way into Bruce and Eliza's lives, testing her as she copes with the grief and trauma of their deaths?

Fourteen-year-old Tilly, alarmed by her mother's increasingly erratic behaviour, is drawn into the disturbing atmosphere of the house as the distance between them grows. And with both of them seeing things, Laura realizes that unless she unearths what drove her parents to flee the house, they will never be free of the past.

©2025 Rebecca Starford (P)2025 Bolinda Publishing Supernatural Thriller & Suspense

Critic Reviews

'A masterfully wrought study of expatriate hysteria and disorientation. A riveting tale of Australian Gothic in which the fetid heat of subtropical Brisbane and the harsh Antipodean sunlight can be made to seem as sinister as the dark.' (Amanda Lohrey, Miles Franklin Award-winning author of The Labyrinth)
'A suspenseful, atmospheric and deliciously Gothic tale that is genuinely impossible to put down.' (Eliza Henry-Jones, author of In the Quiet and Ache)
'... gripped me to the end: I devoured it. What a rare treat to find a novel that offers both white-knuckled suspense and evocative, beautiful prose. I loved it.' (on The Imitator) (Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites and The Good People)
'Starford's handling of her protagonist's internal divisions is assured and completely engrossing. The scene-setting is rich in historical detail but never overdone.' (on The Imitator) (Bri Lee, author of The Work)
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