Muse: Kiftsgate Press

The paintings still remember the life that she's forgetting.

A contemporary gothic thriller set in Edinburgh's winter dark, about a painter, a programme, and a muse who asks very gently to stay.

Mara Gibson hasn't finished a painting in two years. Grief-stricken and desperate, she joins an experimental creativity programme at an Edinburgh university. Her agent says it worked wonders for another artist. The art flows. Better than anything she's made before. The programme delivers exactly what it promised.

She just can't remember what she agreed to.

Small things go missing first. A PIN. The name of a colour she's mixed a thousand times. The walk home from the studio. She's always been scattered. The ADHD, the grief, the sleepless nights. It's easy to explain away. Everyone around her is delighted. The gallerist calls the new work "inevitable". Her agent books the London show. The programme runs its sessions, ticks its checkboxes, files its reports.

But the gaps aren't staying small. And the woman looking back at her from the new paintings is steadier than she's ever been. Calmer. Cleaner. More certain.

She should be grateful. She should stop asking questions. She should trust the process.

She should remember why she can't.

Set among Edinburgh's damp-stone closes and paint-fumed studios, Muse is a Faustian novel about grief, addiction, and the terror of getting everything you asked for.

For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro, Shirley Jackson and Julia Armfield.