Arabella Duskmore has spent forty-three years being sensible.

She believed in practical things: good bras, properly fitting trousers, and the kind of grandmother who told fairy stories because it made her happy ? not because any of it was real. When Grands dies and leaves her an old house in a village called Ashenmere, Bel assumes she's inheriting a project. A property. Something to be sorted, sold, and moved on from.

She is not prepared for a garden that tends itself. A stone gnome named Gerald who takes his responsibilities seriously. A house that seems to know when she needs it to be quiet ? and when she doesn't. Or for the executor of the estate, a careful, attentive man named Jamisen Brentwood, who makes his Thursday visits with entirely professional intentions that are becoming, over time, something harder to categorize.

Ashenmere is full of things that don't show up on a checklist. Arabella is beginning to suspect that she is one of them.

The Peculiar Inheritance of Arabella Duskmore is a quiet, warm novel about what we inherit when we stop thinking we know what things are ? and start paying attention to what they actually are.