When Rebecca Williams' mother dies, she is sent from the city to rural Lincolnshire to live with her father. What she finds is a quiet, unassuming man who lives alone on a large country estate.Lonely and nervous, Rebecca makes friends with a boy she meets at the lake. However, as their friendship develops, she discovers that her new friend is haunted by a secret which Rebecca must first unearth before it can be laid to rest.A ghost story inspired by the guidelines used by the great M. R. James, but with the freshness in tone of the twenty-first century, The Backwater weaves together the guilt of the living and the anger of the dead to produce a chilling but tender story of one girl's struggle to find her place in the world.