The Sea Glass Girls

Coralie Vire is a painter running out of time. Her exhibitions have stopped selling, her studio rent is overdue, and the invitations that once sustained her career have quietly dried up. When Sabine Foss - a wealthy, charismatic patron - offers her a summer residency at a beautiful clifftop estate on the Dorset coast, Coralie accepts with a gratitude she knows is dangerous. The house is exquisite.
The studio is perfect. Sabine's attention is warm, precise, and unnervingly perceptive. But as the weeks unfold, Coralie begins to notice the traces of the women who came before her - artists who arrived exhausted and grateful, who flourished under Sabine's care, and who left behind paintings, possessions, and silences that no one in the house seems willing to explain. A locked room. A name no one mentions.
Dresses in a wardrobe that belong to someone who isn't there. Sea Glass Girls is a novel about patronage and possession, beauty and control, and the difference between being seen and being collected. Set against the luminous Purbeck coast, it explores the intimate, corrosive dynamics between women - the ones who offer rescue and the ones who learn, too late, that rescue always has a price. It is a story about finding your own work, your own eye, and your own weather, in a house that was built to make you stay.