Lucy J. Mercier

What do we owe the women our families chose to forget?Archivist Matilda Wallace returns to her late mother's coastal house expecting the sort of work she understands: inventory, valuation, sale. Instead she finds the walls marked. Beneath layers of wallpaper in room after room lies the same salt circle. Then a name begins to surface in the household accounts from 1924 to 1931, then vanishes. Photographs have had captions cut away.
Letters say less than they should. Salt in the Wallpaper is a literary gothic novella about family erasure, inherited silence, and the marks a life can leave on a house even after a family has done its best to smooth them over. For readers of Sarah Waters, Shirley Jackson, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Marilynne Robinson.