Bone China

by Laura Purcell

First published 2019

Amazon

3.7(10,061)

After tuberculosis destroys his family, Dr Pinecroft establishes an experimental colony on the Cornish coast, convinced that sea air and controlled conditions can succeed where conventional medicine has failed. His rational programme is challenged by local beliefs about fairies and changelings, and the attempt to impose scientific order on an isolated community leaves consequences that survive long after the experiment ends.

Forty years later, Hester Why arrives at Morvoren House to nurse the elderly and largely silent Louise Pinecroft. Hester is running from her own past, but the household's rituals, fears and secrecy make escape impossible. Moving between Georgian Cornwall and the early Victorian period, the novel pits medicine against superstition while showing how trauma can be preserved inside families, houses and the explanations people use to make suffering bearable.