She has spent thirty years arguing other people’s cases. She has no idea how to argue for herself.

Kirsten Tredinnick QC has been one of the most respected barristers at the Criminal Bar for four decades. She has stood in courtrooms and changed the course of lives. She has been certain, precise, and formidable, and she has never once doubted that the work was enough.

Then came the Ashworth case.

She won’t talk about the Ashworth case. Not to her clerk, not to her chambers, not to the daughter who calls every Sunday and asks, carefully, whether she’s all right. The Ashworth case was not a scandal and not a failure, and Kirsten cannot explain why it broke something she didn’t know could be broken.

What she can do is leave. A six-month sabbatical, an old friend’s recommendation, a cottage in the Cotswolds. She does not plan to talk to anyone. She plans to walk and read and be left alone, and when six months have passed she will go back to the Bar, and everything will be as it was.

Michaelmas Cottage in Lower Thistlewick has other ideas.

Michaelmas Cottage is the ninth book in the beloved Enchanted Village series — a story about the woman who has given everything to her work, and the village, the cottage, and one magnificently overconfident thirteen-year-old who refuse to let that be the whole of her.

‘The village doesn’t fix you. It creates the conditions. You do the actual work.’