Epiphany - THE GOLDING: A story within a story

It is midnight, and you are sleeping. I am here at the table with a candle at my elbow, penning the most difficult letter I have ever had to write. They are coming for me. Samuel Withers saw them in the village... ENGLAND 1767 Edward Lillibridge is writing a farewell letter to his son. The controversial author faces trial for heresy after revealing, in a book, the true beginnings of money. FAST-FORWARD TO THE MILLENNIUM... six months before the Global Financial Crisis rocks the economy. Lillibridge's Our True Ancient History, published under the guise of fiction, is out-of print, available only at antiquarian bookshops and largely overlooked. Until now. Rosetta Melki, an idealist whose hope of starting a worldwide charity has been all but crushed by her solo-parent struggles, is enchanted by Our True Ancient History. Lillibridge's tale about a gold-obsessed kingdom (and the sprites they enslave: elfin clan dwellers whose currency of choice is kindness) has ignited a memory Rosetta cannot explain. Rosettta's website surrounding the reading group she's begun with friends has inspired the emergence of other Lillibridge book clubs. Her own Sydney group meets fortnightly at a cosy lamplit cottage, the rental home she secured to escape a gruesome intruder. In a more affluent part of Sydney, finance executive Matthew Weissler (polished, successful, admired) has been questioning his slave-to-the-dollar existence and his marriage to a tantrum-throwing shopaholic. And now he's questioning his sanity after finding he's been followed by an elf. Rosetta's intruder still lurks in the shadows, but what is the stranger's game? Prowler from the suburb Rosetta and her teenaged daughter fled...or traveller from the past, sent to suppress an ancient memory?