Smiling at Shadows [Paperback]

A woman returns to her childhood home after her mother's death, only to find the house still holds secrets she was never meant to uncover. As she sorts through decades of belongings, fragments of memory surface — some comforting, others unsettling. What starts as grief work becomes something darker: a reckoning with family mythology, the stories we tell to survive, and the ones we bury to forget. The past isn't just haunting this house — it's waiting. Written with restraint and emotional precision, this is domestic fiction that knows how to unsettle. The kind of book that makes you look differently at your own family photographs. For readers who like their quiet novels with an undercurrent of dread, or anyone drawn to stories about inheritance that isn't just financial.