Overview

In the dying months of the First World War, a grand house near the Firth of Forth is requisitioned as a military hospital. Volunteer nurse Esther Worrell tends the incoming wounded while Jacob Beresford—heir to the crumbling estate—uncovers a legacy of secrets. As the casualty trains arrive, the house’s past presses in, binding war trauma to older, darker obsessions.

Voice & Atmosphere

Strachan’s prose is lush, shadowed and salt-aired: candlelit corridors, seabirds wheeling over mudflats, wards thinned by morphine and prayer. The tone is classic Gothic threaded through with frontline immediacy; history creaks underfoot while the present bleeds. You can almost smell ether, damp stone and the North Sea.

Characters

Esther is clear-sighted and compassionate, a widow who refuses to let grief define her. Jacob is brittle with inheritance—haunted by a father’s absence and a house that won’t let him go. Orderlies, surgeons and patients add human grain, their private terrors echoing the estate’s own unfinished business.

Themes

War’s aftermath, class and duty, the ethics of remembrance. The novel links shell shock with older hauntings, asking what the living owe the lost. It probes possession—of property, memory, bodies—and how obsession can masquerade as love or legacy. Recovery here is complicated, partial, sometimes impossible.

What Worked

• Atmospheric setting: coastal Scotland rendered with tactile, eerie specificity.
• Dual engines: intimate hospital drama twined with manor-house mystery.
• Elegant prose: controlled, evocative sentences that carry dread and tenderness together.

Minor Quibbles

• A few Gothic reveals land late, softening their impact for pace-first readers.
• Jacob’s interiority occasionally recedes behind the house’s mythos when you want more of the man.

Final Thoughts

Salt-dark and beautifully wrought, The Unrecovered marries war’s intimate wreckage to a classic Scottish haunting—an assured debut that lingers like sea mist.

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)