A Garden for the Haunted Heart

Nathaniel Hambleton hears what houses remember.

Banished from London after a frightening supernatural episode, the twenty-six-year-old son of a viscount is sent to his family's isolated summer estate. There, floorboards whisper distant conversations, shadows take human form, and forgotten music carries the memories of the dead.

His father calls it madness. The family physician threatens confinement. Nathan has learned that survival depends on silence.

Then Peter Watts arrives as the estate's new groundskeeper.

Peter is warm, irreverent, and completely unimpressed by aristocratic rules. The first time Nathan touches him, the overwhelming hum inside his senses disappears. Their friendship grows through greenhouse work, spring picnics, secret conversations, and midnight visits that make the empty house feel like a home.

Peter believes Nathan's strange abilities are neither shameful nor an illness. Nathan begins to believe him.

But summer will bring the Hambleton family back to the estate. Nathan's controlling father expects obedience, his brother's wedding exposes painful secrets from Peter's past, and affection between two men of different classes could cost them their families, livelihoods, and freedom.

As the house grows louder and the violets begin to bloom, Nathan must choose between the life designed for him and the dangerous possibility of being loved exactly as he is.

Atmospheric, tender, and quietly supernatural, A Garden for the Haunted Heart is a Victorian gothic gay romance about second sight, class boundaries, medical cruelty, found family, forbidden love, and two men creating a future beyond the walls that tried to contain them.