What do you think?
Rate this book
Lying Beneath: A painting. A buried secret. A daughter who inherits her mother's unfinished business — 30 years too late.
When Emma Harding arrives at a new museum in Northampton to investigate the legal status of a newly discovered Canaletto worth forty million pounds, she expects a straightforward covenant review. What she finds is rather more complicated.
The painting depicts a valley in central Italy where her mother, archaeologist Susan Harding, worked one summer in 1994 — and never talked about properly again. The museum's director, Jacob Ellery, was there too. Something happened that summer. Susan spent thirty years not quite saying what it was.
Moving between present-day Bloomsbury, Northampton and the heat of an Italian excavation thirty years ago, Lying Beneath is a novel about what gets buried and what endures. About the distance between the official record and the truth underneath it. About a daughter who discovers that the most important case of her career is also the one her mother never got to finish.
Part literary thriller, part excavation of memory and culpability, Lying Beneath asks what we owe to the past — and what happens when someone finally decides to go looking.
Lying Beneath is the first novel in the Emma Harding trilogy.
The painting depicts a valley in central Italy where her mother, archaeologist Susan Harding, worked one summer in 1994 — and never talked about properly again. The museum's director, Jacob Ellery, was there too. Something happened that summer. Susan spent thirty years not quite saying what it was.
Moving between present-day Bloomsbury, Northampton and the heat of an Italian excavation thirty years ago, Lying Beneath is a novel about what gets buried and what endures. About the distance between the official record and the truth underneath it. About a daughter who discovers that the most important case of her career is also the one her mother never got to finish.
Part literary thriller, part excavation of memory and culpability, Lying Beneath asks what we owe to the past — and what happens when someone finally decides to go looking.
Lying Beneath is the first novel in the Emma Harding trilogy.
516 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 7, 2026
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
No one has reviewed this book yet.