The Keeping Field
In the hottest summer England has ever recorded, a town that has not buried its dead properly in a hundred and thirty-five years is beginning to run dry. It...
About this ebook
The Keeping Field by Robert Martin is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £9.90. Language: English. Categories: Horror.
In the hottest summer England has ever recorded, a town that has not buried its dead properly in a hundred and thirty-five years is beginning to run dry. It is June 1976.
The reservoirs are down to a tenth, the rivers are cracked mud, and Ruth Garside — thirty-four, exhausted, and very good at her job — is sent to the salt town of Halderwych to find out why its drinking water has turned to brine. It should take her four days.
Halderwych is the friendliest place she has ever worked. Everyone opens a door for her. Everyone puts the kettle on. And nobody answers a single question. Because there is something wrong with the town, and it is not a haunting. Bread does not go stale here. Milk does not turn.
A butcher's window stands open in ninety-degree heat with no flies at it, and a boy's grazed knee has looked exactly the same for eleven days.
Beneath the streets, in a chamber the salt workers broke into in 1841, the brine keeps whatever it is given — and for four generations this town has been giving it the worst things that ever happened to it. Now the drought is draining the field.
Whatever Halderwych has refused to let end is working loose and coming up through the wells, and Ruth is the only person alive who can read the numbers.
She has one working instrument, no authority, an assistant with a wound that will not close, and a kindly seventy-one-year-old clerk who has already written her name in a ledger.
And she has a brother in a hospital bed sixty miles away who has not moved, spoken or died in eleven years — which is the one qualification this town has been waiting for.
THE KEEPING FIELD is a slow-burn British folk horror for readers who want dread that accumulates rather than jumps: a novel about salt, water, paperwork and love, and about the difference between keeping a person and refusing to let them finish.
It is a complete, closed, standalone story with no sequel and no loose ends. Read it with a glass of water beside you. And when you have finished it —when you know what is under that hill, and what it costs to bring it up — come back and tell the next reader what you thought.
This is a book that gets passed from hand to hand, and yours is the hand it starts in.
Book details
Details: 251 pages, about 70,022 words, published by Robert Martin, publication date 5 September 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 4.5 hours.
Format, language, and reading
The Keeping Field is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.
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