Author: Kayte Nunn

Kayte Nunn combines historical fiction with a gothic mystery in The Silk House. The novel moves among three women and two periods: Rowan Caswell leaves her village in the eighteenth century to serve a silk merchant's household, Mary-Louise Stephenson pursues the restricted craft of silk design, and Thea Rust arrives in the present to supervise the first girls admitted to an English boarding school. Their stories converge around a converted silk factory, botanical knowledge, patterned fabric, and secrets embedded in the building. The novel appeared from Hachette Australia in 2020, with Orion issuing a British edition in 2021. Nunn uses the silk trade and women's healing practices as more than atmosphere; both show knowledge being controlled, transmitted, or feared. The audiobook is performed by Amanda McKay. Across The Silk House, shifts of voice and period expose how choices made within a merchant household continue to shape the school's unsettling present. Its suspense grows from labor, memory, and the limited authority available to each woman.