An outstanding historical novel for fans of The Essex Serpent and Piranesi Ray Celestin's
Palace of Shadows can lay claim to having at its centre the most Gothic House of them all . . .
"I'm not asking you to build something impossible. I'm asking you to build something that
contains all the strangeness and confusion that you can muster.? Samuel Etherstone a penniless
artist is adrift in London. His disturbing art is shunned by patrons and critics alike his
friend Oscar Wilde is now an exile living in Paris and a personal tragedy has taken its toll.
So when he is contacted by a mysterious heiress Mrs Chesterfield and asked to work on a
commission for the house she is building on the desolate Smugglers' Coast of North Yorkshire
he accepts the offer. Staying overnight in the local village pub Samuel is warned not to spend
too much time there. He is told of the fate of the house's original architect Francisco Varano
chilling tales of folk driven mad by the house of it being built on haunted land where young
girls have vanished their ghosts now calling others to their deaths... It is only on arrival
at the Chesterfield house that he learns the sinister details of Varano's disappearance. And
yet its owner keeps adding wing upon wing and no one will tell him the reason behind her
chilling obsession . . . But as Samuel delves deeper into the mysteries that swirl about the
house the nature of the project becomes terrifyingly clear.
