The White People

A lonely heiress grows up behind the walls of Muircarrie Castle, where the Scottish moors press close and the line between the living and the dead grows thin. Orphaned at birth and raised by distant relatives who keep the world at arm's length, young Ysobel finds companionship in strange places: in the whispering wind, in the ancient stones of her family's home, and most hauntingly in Wee Brown Elspeth, a ethereal girl who appears and disappears like morning mist. As Ysobel matures, she must reckon with the secrets of her lineage, the weight of inheritance, and the terrifying beauty of a landscape where legend bleeds into life. Burnett crafts a meditation on childhood loneliness and the imaginative worlds children build to survive isolation, rendered in prose as atmospheric as the Highland fog itself. The novel asks what it means to belong to a family, a place, a story older than memory.