What The Roots Remember – Paperback

A woman living in a small cottage in County Clare is heartbroken when her beloved Hawthorn tree-a tree her grandmother planted-is cut down because its roots are damaging the local road. When the roots are excavated, workers find a small, rusted iron box containing a diary written in ancient Gaelic.

The diary tells the story of a woman in the 1600s, a bean feasa (a wise woman, a healer) who planted that tree as a prison. Beneath the roots of that Hawthorn, she buried a malevolent spirit-the ghost of a British landlord who had terrorized the village and refused to leave even after death. The tree was the lock. The roots were the chains. The diary is the key.

Now that the tree is gone, the spirit is waking up. The woman in the present day begins to see the ghost-a cruel, sneering man in old-fashioned clothes-watching her from the edge of the road. She feels a creeping cold in her house. The village starts to experience strange, unexplainable events.

She must decipher the diary, learn the old rituals of the bean feasa, and find a way to put the spirit back in the ground. But to do that, she needs to plant a new tree-and she needs to convince the village that the old ways are real, before the landlord takes his revenge on the descendants of the people who buried him.