num_pages: 336
description: A suspenseful feminist Gothic coming-of-age tale with shades of Patricia Highsmith Rebecca and Atonement pitched against the sun-soaked backdrop of a summer holiday on the French Riviera.Welcome to the Chateau des Stes a jewel of the Cote dAzur where long summer days bring ease glamour and decadence to the holidaymakers who can afford it.Ruby Ashby adores her parents house in France but this August everything feels different. Unexpected guests have descended upon the chateaufriends of her parents and their daughtersand they are keen to enjoy the hot extravagant summer holiday to its fullest potential. Far from England safe in their wealth and privilege the adults revel in bad behavior without consequence while the girls are treated as playthings or abandoned to their own devices. But despite languid days spent poolside and long nights spent drinking a simmering tension is growing between the families and the sanctuary that Ruby cherishes soon starts to feel like a gilded cage.Over two decades later the chateau is for sale its days of splendor and luxury long gone leaving behind a terrible history and an ugly legacy. A young widow has returned to France wanting to purchase the chateau despite her shocking memories of what transpired that fateful summer. But there is another person who is equally haunted by the chateau and who also seeks to reclaim it. Who will set the chateau freeand who will become yet another of its victims?With riveting psychological complexity The Ruins captures the glittering allure of the Mediterraneanand the dark shadows that wait beneath the surface.
language: English
title: The Ruins
publisher: St. Martin's Press