The Gaia Project

Kate Howard

May 2026 · Book Guild Publishing

About this ebook

On a warm Italian evening, fourteen-year-old Gaia vanishes after walking away from a village festa. Two decades later, the mystery still shadows everyone who knew her: Frank, the distant father who never understood her; Paul, the American half-brother who had only just begun to; and Bree, who met Gaia during that long-ago holiday and found the girl’s presence unsettling in ways she has never fully faced.

Now Bree returns to Italy with her young daughter whilst grieving for her mother and hoping to reconnect with Frank and Paul. But Paul is consumed by a secretive documentary project about his sister’s disappearance, and Bree is drawn back into the tangle of desires, jealousies and omissions that shaped the summer Gaia went missing.

As past and present collide, painful truths about that night begin to surface – truths that threaten the fragile bonds Bree has rebuilt and force her to confront the consequences of what she witnessed.

About the author

Kate Howard grew up in Hertfordshire before attending Universities in Sussex and Kent where she studied English Literature and Modernism. She spent many years travelling and living in Italy, where much of her writing is based. Her first novel The Ornatrix was published by Duckworth Press in 2016. She now lives in Brighton.