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.