Six-year-old Flora Lea Linden wakes up alone in a wooded glade on the banks of the River Thames as she thinks she hears someone calling her name. She gets up and decides to explore Whisperwood, the world she shares with her 15-year-old sister, Hazel. She goes to the river’s edge with her teddy bear and nearly slips but catches herself. She tells her bear that they’re safe.

Hazel is working her last shift at an antiquarian bookshop in London. She watches the customers and jokes with her colleagues, Poppy and Tim, about her upcoming role at Sotheby’s auction house. Poppy and Tim are envious but good natured. Tim is the owner’s son, while Poppy is a young woman who was offered a job there while she was without a home. Hazel opens and catalogues a shipment of rare items, including a handwritten letter from Ernest Hemingway and a fairy tale book by an American author, accompanied by illustrations. As she works, Hazel thinks about her upcoming dinner with her boyfriend, mother, stepfather, and half-brother. She goes to help a customer find a book of poetry, and her best friend Kelty drops by with her daughter, Midge. Hazel returns to her work and opens the American fairy tale; she is shocked to discover it is a story about Whisperwood, the secret place she shared with her lost sister, who had “disappeared […] into the river” (11).