Fom international bestselling author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Holly Ringland, comes a haunting and magical novel about joy, grief, courage, and transformation.

Sally Piper is in-conversation with Holly Ringland discussing The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding.


On the afternoon that Esther Wilding drove homeward along the coast, a year after her sister had walked into the sea and disappeared, the light was painfully golden.

The last time Esther Wilding's beloved older sister Aura was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura's disappearance, Esther's family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister's death, Esther reluctantly travels from lutruwita, Tasmania to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands, following the trail of the stories Aura left behind: seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, alongside cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body.

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is a sweeping, deeply beautiful and profoundly moving novel about the far-reaches of sisterly love, the power of wearing your heart on your skin, and the ways life can transform when we find the courage to feel the fullness of both grief and joy.

Holly Ringland is the author of the international bestseller The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which has been translated into thirty-one languages and is being adapted into a seven-part TV series starring Sigourney Weaver and produced by Amazon Prime and Bruna Papandrea's Made Up Stories. It will screen in more than 240 countries and territories in 2023. In 2019, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the Australian Book Industry Award, General Fiction Book of the Year. In 2021, Holly co-hosted an eight-episode ABC TV series, Back to Nature, alongside Aaron Pedersen. After living between Australia and the UK for ten years, Holly has been based in the Yugambeh region of southeast Queensland since 2020, where she wrote The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding in her 'office', a vintage caravan named Frenchie.