The Glimmering

A haunting mystery of a missing child, a small town full of secrets, and a forest that remembers everything.

Set against the haunting beauty of the Australian landscape, The Glimmering blends mystery, folklore, and emotional depth to explore how the past shapes us — and how far we’ll go to outrun it.

Readers who love atmospheric, character‑driven fiction will find themselves drawn into Bundernook’s shadowed forest, where childhood memories blur with myth and where the truth glimmers just beyond reach.

With its dual timelines, richly textured setting, and unforgettable cast of characters, The Glimmering is a story about guilt, identity, and the secrets we bury to survive. It’s a novel for readers who crave mystery with heart, folklore with teeth, and landscapes that feel alive on the page.

“Light burst through a hole in the forest roof, but it wasn’t the right sort of light. It didn’t sparkle. Joel yawned, and when he forced his tired eyes open, faces seemed to shift in the bark. It felt as though the forest was watching him.”

About the story

Bundernook forest has always held its stories close — the shimmer between the trees, the whispers of a place locals call the glimmering, and the memory of a little boy who walked into the bush and never came home.

Lauren Swan has spent twenty years trying to outrun that story. A new name, a new town, a life built on careful quiet. But when storm chaser Amber Martin captures footage of a flood sweeping through the abandoned settlement of Bundernook, old rumours rise with the water. Amber becomes drawn to the unsolved disappearance of four‑year‑old Joel Robin, and her questions begin to ripple outward — reaching Lauren, who has more reason than anyone to fear what the forest might give up.

As Amber digs into the past and Lauren is pulled back toward the place she fled, Bundernook’s tangled bushland becomes a presence in its own right: sheltering, unsettling, and threaded with the uneasy border between folklore and fact. What happened to Joel is a story shaped by memory, by grief, and by the land itself — and the truth may lie somewhere between what was seen, what was believed, and what the forest has kept hidden.

Themes of the Novel

Memory & Identity

How do the stories we inherit — and the ones we bury — shape who we become? The Glimmering explores the fragile, shifting nature of memory and the lengths we go to reinvent ourselves.

Guilt & Silence

The novel traces the quiet, corrosive weight of guilt carried from childhood into adulthood, and the way silence can become both a refuge and a prison.

Folklore & the Natural World

Bundernook Forest is more than a setting — it’s a keeper of old stories, a witness to past violence, and a place where myth and reality blur at the edges.

Secrets & Survival

Families, towns, and individuals all protect their own versions of the truth. Some secrets are kept out of love. Others out of fear. All of them have consequences.

The Past That Refuses to Stay Buried

Across dual timelines, the novel examines how unresolved trauma echoes through generations — and how the truth has a way of rising, like floodwater, no matter how deeply it’s been buried.

Content Note: This novel includes themes of child disappearance, childhood trauma, emotional abuse, grief, mild peril involving children, and unsettling or ambiguous supernatural elements. These themes are handled with care, but please read mindfully.

Language Note: This edition retains Australian English spelling and usage.

“S.F.E. Holm is currently working on her next atmospheric mystery, set along a rugged coastline where the past refuses to stay buried.”

Every story begins with a place, and for The Glimmering, that place was a forest — not a specific one, but an amalgam of the bushland that shaped my childhood imagination. I’ve always been drawn to landscapes that feel alive, where light shifts strangely and silence carries its own kind of weight. Bundernook grew from that fascination: a town pressed against the edge of a forest that remembers more than it reveals.

The idea for the novel arrived as an image: a child standing beneath a canopy of shifting light, unsure whether the forest was sheltering him or watching him. From there came the questions that shaped the story — what happens to a place after a tragedy? How does a community carry its guilt? And what does it mean to grow up in the shadow of something half‑remembered, half‑imagined?

Folklore has always threaded through the landscapes I love. Not in the sense of monsters or magic, but in the quieter way stories cling to certain places — the shimmer at the corner of your vision, the feeling that something is just out of sight. Bundernook’s “glimmering” grew from that idea: a mythic presence that blurs the line between memory and imagination.

At its heart, The Glimmering is a story about three women bound by a single moment in the past, each carrying her own version of the truth. It’s about the stories we inherit, the ones we bury, and the ones that refuse to stay hidden.

1. Memory and truth — The novel explores how memory can shift over time. Which character’s memories did you trust most, and why?

2. Landscape as character — How does Bundernook Forest shape the events of the story? Did it feel like a character in its own right?

3. Guilt and silence — Many characters carry unspoken guilt. How does silence protect them, and how does it harm them?

4. Dual timelines — How did the shifting timelines affect your understanding of the mystery?

5. Folklore and the glimmering — Do you think the “glimmering” is supernatural, psychological, or symbolic?

6. Lauren’s reinvention — What does Lauren gain — and lose — by changing her name and leaving Bundernook?

7. Amber’s role — As an outsider, Amber sees the town differently. How does her perspective shift the story?

8. Erin’s burden — How did Erin’s childhood experience shape her adult life?

9. Community and complicity — In what ways is Bundernook itself responsible for what happened to Joel?

10. Nature and danger — How do the floods mirror the emotional upheaval in the story?

11. Secrets — Which secret revealed in the novel surprised you most?

12. The ending — Without giving spoilers, how did the ending make you feel? Did it offer closure, or something more ambiguous?

I do hope you enjoyed reading the book, and that the characters stay with you after the last page. Best wishes,

S.F.E. Holm