The Original by Nell Stevens

'There was a painting my family set on fire. It burned to ashes, and then it came back.’ Oxfordshire, 1899.

Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle’s home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls.   Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena.

After years missing at sea, Grace’s cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live.
 
  Deftly-plotted and shimmering with Nell Stevens’s distinctive intelligence, style and wit, THE ORIGINAL is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original.
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'Intricate, endlessly intriguing... The reader is kept guessing until the very end' OBSERVER
'A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters' OLIVIA LAING