What do we owe the women our families chose to forget?Archivist Matilda Wallace returns to her late mother's coastal house expecting the sort of work she understands: inventory, valuation, sale. Instead she finds the walls marked.Beneath layers of wallpaper in room after room lies the same salt circle. Then a name begins to surface in the household accounts from 1924 to 1931, then vanishes. Photographs have had captions cut away. Letters say less than they should.Salt in the Wallpaper is a literary gothic novella about family erasure, inherited silence, and the marks a life can leave on a house even after a family has done its best to smooth them over.For readers of Sarah Waters, Shirley Jackson, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Marilynne Robinson.