The Hollow

In the autumn of 1940, a war-damaged veteran returns to the Midlands town he once left behind. Walking the lanes beyond Stourbridge, he encounters Bella, the girl he knew before France, before fracture, before the long education of survival. They return to a field they once shared, to an ancient wych elm standing patient at its edge. When sirens split the November evening and the sky begins to burn, past and present collapse into one another. Years later, boys discover a skeleton inside a hollow tree in Hagley Wood. A woman. A missing hand. A question appears on walls across the region: Who put Bella in the Wych Elm? Told in a voice both restrained and unreliable, The Hollow is a psychological novella about memory, trauma, and the thin seam between witness and confession, where what is remembered may be less dangerous than what is not.