The Distant Hours

In 2011, bestselling Australian author Kate Morton published her third novel, The Distant Hours. An atmospheric and moody mystery, the novel follows a woman’s attempts to understand the details of her mother’s stay at an old enigmatic castle in the English countryside during WWII. Following aspects of the story in two different timeframes, the 1990s present and the 1940s past, the novel shifts points of view as chapters alternate narrators. Using suspense, cliff-hangers, and an intricate and detail-rich plot, the novel tracks how the small everyday disappointments and betrayals add up.

The book opens in 1990s London. The bookish Edith (Edie) Burchill has a difficult relationship with her mother, Meredith. During one of their tense get-togethers, Meredith receives a 50-year-old letter and has a shockingly extreme reaction that surprises Edie. The letter is from Milderhurst Castle, the place where three sisters took Meredith in when she and other children were evacuated from London during the Blitz. A few months later, Edie decides to visit the castle after learning that it was also the home of Raymond Blythe, the author of The True History of the Mud Man, her favorite book as a child.

On the castle tour, Edie meets the three sisters: 80-something year old twins Persephone (Percy) and Seraphina (Saffy) and their younger sister, Juniper. Juniper periodically goes into fugue states after which she doesn’t remember what she has done. Percy leads Edie on the tour, which includes the library where Raymond’s wife Muriel was killed in a fire. In an unguarded moment, Juniper confuses Edie for Meredith and confesses to doing something bad. Cutting her sister off, Percy ejects Edie from the castle.



The narrative flashes back to 1941. Juniper is supposed to bring her fiancé, Thomas Cavill, to dinner. As Percy and Saffy wait during a raging storm, there is a knock at the door.

In the present, Meredith refuses to tell Edie anything about what it was like to be at Milderhurst, but Edie is in luck when she stumbles on a trove of letters Meredith wrote to her family from there.

In 1941, Percy forgets to pick up the evacuee assigned to the castle because her jealousy of her housekeeper Lucy’s pending nuptials distracts her from doing so. Instead, Juniper collects Meredith and brings her back to the castle. There, Saffy is trying to take care of her father, Raymond, who now suffers from the paranoid delusion that the Mud Man is real. Lucy resigns and announces her engagement.



In the present, while she is researching what happened, Edie finds a classified ad from someone named Theo Cavill, who is looking for information on Thomas Cavill. When she finds Theo in a nursing home, it turns out that Theo is Thomas’s now-elderly brother. He tells Edie that Thomas has been missing since 1941. Theo did receive a letter from Thomas once saying that he had run off with a woman, but Theo doesn’t think that this letter is genuine.

Back in 1941, Thomas had been Meredith’s English teacher in London. Many of his students have been evacuated to Kent, and he comes to check on them. While swimming in the Milderhurst Castle pool, he is smitten with Juniper, who also is very attracted to him, but he must leave as he is due to ship out for army training. Juniper tells Meredith that her goal is to escape from the castle rather than to end up delusional and trapped like her father.

In the present, the Blythes have approved a new edition of The Mud Man, provided Edie writes the introduction. They allow Edie access to Raymond’s notebooks, which no one has seen since his death.



In the past, Percy warily goes to housekeeper Lucy’s wedding. Later, in London, Meredith and Juniper run into Thomas, who is back from the war. He and Juniper start dating in secret, but when they get engaged, they decide to visit Milderhurst (to have the dinner mentioned in the first flashback).

In the present, Saffy tries to excuse Percy’s coldness by saying that Percy is just overly protective of Juniper, the castle, and their father’s legacy. Meanwhile, in Raymond’s papers, Edie finds evidence that he stole the idea of the Mud Man from Saffy’s childhood fear. Percy has planted this evidence for Edie to find. When Raymond discovered that his wife Muriel was having an affair, he pushed her lover into the moat and started the fire that killed Muriel. Saffy saw the lover fall to his death and had nightmares about a mud-covered man coming to kill her. Percy also confesses that she is the one who accidentally killed Thomas in the storm before the dinner, thinking that he was an intruder.

Lucy’s daughter, who now runs a bed and breakfast, shows Edie love letters addressed to Lucy. Edie realizes that they are signed “P.” Percy and Lucy were lovers, and that’s why Percy was so jealous when Lucy got married. Alarms awake Edie in the middle of the night, and Milderhurst Castle is on fire.



The narrative flashes back to the knock on the door in 1941. A wet Juniper comes in the house covered in blood and with no memory of how she got there. Percy tries to hide this evidence of whatever Juniper has done, but Saffy suddenly has an episode where her childhood terror of the Mud Man recurs. When Thomas finally arrives at the castle, Saffy freaks out and kills him with a wrench. Later, Percy hides his body in the moat, assuming that Juniper has killed him. Juniper loses her mind under the guilt of thinking she killed the love of her life. In truth, Juniper was covered in blood because she had helped deliver a baby on her way to the castle that night. However, Saffy never realizes that she has killed Thomas.

In the present, knowing that all the secrets are about to be revealed, Percy drugs her sisters and sets fire to the house to kill them and herself.