Four friends. One antique map. A village that shouldn't exist.

When Jane finds a hand-drawn map tucked inside a book in a Krakow antique shop, it's just an interesting piece for her collection. When Tamsin's grandfather's bedtime stories start lining up with places on that map, it becomes something else entirely.

A spring-break backpacking trip through the Polish mountains was supposed to be their long-overdue reunion, four best friends finally cashing in on a promise they'd made in college. Instead, Jane, Tamsin, Sam, and Gwendolyn walk out of a forest that shouldn't be there, into a village that stopped keeping time eight hundred years ago, and discover that Tamsin's family didn't just tell those stories.

They founded the place.

And now something ancient is waking beneath the mountain, and the four of them are the only ones who can put it back to sleep.

The Secret of the Shades is the first in a series about faith, friendship, and the strange corners of the world that ask ordinary women to become something more.