Please note that this title is currently out of stock but is available for pre-order. While we don’t have an exact publishing date yet, it is expected to be available within approximately 4 to 6 weeks.
£9.50
“A hauntingly elegant ghost story—Falling Story blends folk horror with a moving meditation on memory, loss, and the shadows of youth.” —James Baxter, author of Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction
“Unsettling, unforgettable and unputdownable. A hauntingly brilliant ghost story and folk horror novel.” – The Book Club
“Beautifully crafted. Wholly disturbing. You can’t really begin to fathom the bottomless terror of falling until you have read Falling Story.” – Writers Forum.
When AJ begins to dream of falling, he is drawn back to his youth and the enigmatic Joetta Thomson—an intelligent but troubled young woman marked by a secret inheritance: the ability to see ghosts.
What begins as an intimate portrait of friendship becomes a dark descent into folklore and ritual, as Jo, compelled by the discovery of her family’s grimoire, edges ever closer to a fate entwined with the restless spirits of Prestbury. From ruined priory to windswept hill, the novel traces the thin line between the living and the dead, and the fragile boundary between salvation and surrender.
In the tradition of M.R. James yet refracted through the unsettling modernism of Mark Danielewski and Paul Auster, Falling Story combines the gothic atmosphere of folk horror with a lyrical exploration of loss and the persistence of the past. Both ghost story and elegy, it is a work that lingers like an afterimage—unsettling, elegiac, and impossible to forget
Callan B –
read Falling Story as part of our book club and it turned out to be one of those books that gave us far more to talk about than I expected. I thought I was going to be reading a fairly traditional ghost story, but it is much more unusual than that.
What stayed with me most was the relationship between AJ and Joetta. There is a sadness running through the whole novel, particularly in the way the past keeps intruding on the present. Jo is a fascinating character because you are never quite sure whether you should be frightened for her or frightened of what she is becoming involved with.
The supernatural elements are genuinely unsettling, but the book doesn’t depend on shocks. It builds its atmosphere slowly through memories, places, folklore and the feeling that something from the past has never completely gone away.
Our group had very different interpretations of parts of the story, which made for a great discussion. Some saw it primarily as a ghost story, while others thought it was really about grief, memory and the people from our youth who never entirely leave us. I was definitely in the second camp.
A strange, haunting and very memorable novel.
C Walsh –
Our book club received Falling Story as a review copy from Foreshore Publishing, and I can safely say it wasn’t like anything we’d read recently. This is not a horror novel full of jump scares. It is quieter, stranger and, for me, much more disturbing because of that. Several days after finishing it I was still thinking about Jo and AJ.
Junot D –
I read this with my book club and absolutely loved the atmosphere of it. Falling Story is eerie without trying too hard to frighten you. It creeps up on you.
At first I became absorbed in AJ’s memories and his friendship with Jo, and then almost without noticing I realised how dark the story had become. Ghosts, old rituals, family secrets and the landscape all begin to overlap until there is this wonderful sense that the boundary between past and present—and between the living and the dead—is disappearing.
It is also surprisingly moving. Beneath all the supernatural elements I thought there was a very human story about friendship, loss and the way we carry certain people with us throughout our lives.
Definitely one for readers who enjoy intelligent, atmospheric ghost stories rather than straightforward horror.
Kevin Percy –
Falling Story was our latest book-club read and it divided us slightly—which actually made it one of our best discussions!
I loved it. One or two members found the slower, dreamlike quality unusual at first, but I thought that was exactly what made the book work. There is a constant feeling of unease, as though something is happening just outside your field of vision.
The friendship between AJ and Jo gives the supernatural story its emotional heart, and Jo’s connection with ghosts and her family’s occult past gradually becomes genuinely disturbing. I particularly liked that the author doesn’t explain everything away. You are allowed to wonder, interpret and occasionally doubt what you have just read.
By the end, I didn’t feel as though I’d simply finished a ghost story. I felt as though I’d been inside somebody else’s memories for a while—and some of them weren’t memories I particularly wanted following me home.
Beautifully strange and unsettling. I would happily recommend it to another book club.