Frost Hollow Hall: 'The Queen of Historical Fiction at her finest.' Guardian

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Lots of mysteries are tied in throughout, and there is not a single page which does not vividly capture the imagination. For those who aren’t fans of ghost stories, this one isn’t as scary, as much as it is life-affirming.

My favourite character was Tilly Higgins because she was desperate to support her mother when her sister and father run away abroad. At the start of the novel, Tilly works as a ‘pupil-helper’ at her local school, ‘cleaning slates and carrying coal and showing the young ones how to read’. Frost Hollow Hall is more than a ghost story; it’s a story that lives and breathes, and paint wonderful pictures, and it’s a story about love, family, loss, regret, and learning to let go, told beautifully, with both subtlety and charm. The main thread of the novel begins in the first chapter, when our young narrator, Tilly Higgins, is introduced. Tilly, unlike the rest of the village girls, goes because she never backs down from a dare and not because she’s ‘silly’ over Will.There are certainly odd goings-on afoot, with poltergeist pottery that crashes around by itself, terrified staff, a housekeeper that seems to know a lot more than she is letting on, seances and Lady Barrington herself, wild with grief.

The characters are all phenomenal and we see the growth of every single one throughout the novel but I had a special soft spot for Tilly, a normal, independent and loving girl that although she has problems of her own delights in being able to help other people.Once told by poet Ted Hughes her writing was ‘dangerous’, it took Emma Carroll twenty years of English teaching and a life-changing cancer diagnosis to feel brave enough to give her dream of being an author a try. It's all about the dead here, she's told, and in the heart of the house she soon discovers all manner of dark secrets . So cold it knocked the breath clean out of me… Slowly, gently, the lake closed over my head and all went quiet but for the blood pounding in my ears.