Laura Purcell is a former bookseller, she lives in Colchester with her husband and pet guinea pigs. Her second novel for Bloomsbury, gothic chiller The Corset, was published in 2018.

laurapurcell.com

@spookypurcell

Winner of the W H Smith Thumping Good Read Award

As featured on the Radio 2 Book Club and the Zoe Ball ITV Book Club

'[An] extraordinary, memorable and truly haunting book' Jojo Moyes

'[It] shone, for originality for the sheer quality of the writing, the characters and some masterly chills' Peter James

Some doors are locked for a reason...

Newly married, newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge.

With her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband's awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. For inside her new home lies a locked room, and beyond that door lies a two-hundred-year-old diary and a deeply unsettling painted wooden figure - a Silent Companion - that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself...

Ghost stories are for Christmas. Some recent ones haven't quite got it right but this is terrific. Perfect setting, great build-up, chilling. What more could you want ?

Layering on the dark and creepy, this intriguingly plotted novel is the full-blown Gothic, maintaining throughout an unsettling claustrophobic atmosphere mixed with some unusual historical detail

A deliciously creepy ghost story

Laura Purcell has nailed it with a story that conjures up Susan Hill's The Woman In Black, Henry James's The Turn Of The Screw and a little bit of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

A perfect read for a winter night . Intriguing, nuanced and genuinely eerie

A creepy, unsettling tale that I had to finish reading in broad daylight

A sinister slice of Victorian gothic... creepy and page-turning

Really tense and unnerving, it still won't let me go

A true page-turner...neatly crafted and compelling...with a spine-tingling revelation every few pages

Irresistibly creepy, this romps along, Purcell turning her screws with skill. It's what crumpets and dismal afternoons were made for

Writing in the tradition of country house ghost stories, Laura Purcell has created a book that is unnerving and compelling in equal measure. The Silent Companions is an atmospheric gothic tale which chills the blood

Not since The Little Stranger has a book so entranced and haunted me. Compelling, bewitching and beautifully written. Read it if you dare

A superbly atmospheric, tense novel full of creeping dread. I could only read it during daylight hours!

A brilliant, unsettling debut. Don't read just before bedtime!

If The Silent Companions lands on your night table, don't plan on leaving your bed anytime soon. Immersive, meticulous, and reminiscent of the masters of gothic fiction - not only a compulsively readable ghost story, but a skillful, loving ode to the entire genre

Frighteningly atmospheric, genuinely haunting and psychologically astute, the horror of The Silent Companions lingers like truth in the darkest corners of the human mind

This incredibly creepy ghost story plays out in the very best tradition against a backdrop of a crumbling house . Superb

Things begin to go bump in broad daylight as well as the night. Compulsively creepy

Menacing and unsettling

Compelling and claustrophobic. The pages all but turn by themselves

Magnificently creepy . I really wished it were longer

You may want to leave the light on once you put down this intensely spooky Gothic chiller ... Irresistibly

creepy