Diane Setterfield

A compelling emotional mystery about family secrets and the magic of books and storytelling. A dying writer bids a young bookshop assistant to write her biography.

William Bellman, as a boy of 11, killed a shiny black rook with a catapult. He grows up to have a happy marriage to a beautiful woman, becomes father to a brood of bright, strong children, and thrives in business, but one by one, people around him die. And at each funeral, he is startled to see a strange man in black, smiling at him. At first, the dead are distant relatives, but eventually his own children die, and then his wife, leaving behind only...