The Shifting Fog

The Shifting Fog is the debut novel of the Australian author Kate Morton, originally published under the title The Shifting Fog. In the summer of 1924, a grand social dinner is being held at Riverton Manor in England; as fireworks rise, the young poet Robbie Hunter shoots himself by the lake. People take the death as a romantic and melancholy story, but only Grace, then a housemaid at the manor, knows what truly happened that night. Seventy-five years later, in 1999, a film producer prepares a movie about the poet Robbie, and the production invites the ninety-eight-year-old Grace back to Riverton Manor for research. The old house, old photographs, and old letters surface one by one, the memory sealed for years can no longer be held back, and the tragedy the household refuses to mention is gradually uncovered. The novel advances in alternating double narrative: on one side, aristocratic manor life drawing to a close in the 1920s under the shadow of war; on the other, an old woman at the end of the century struggling between memory and silence. Two sisters, one raised inside the manor and one outside; a secret bound up with Grace's fate; and the tangled claims of class, love, and loyalty weave together a family saga that combines Gothic atmosphere with suspense. Through Grace's voice, the author tells of guilt and reconciliation in the face of the past.