John Harwood
British Pbk Original - Jonathan Cape (2004) |
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The Ghost Writer
Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s. Yet the eerie presences in her tales of bohemian London, of aspiring young women and struggling artists, are not musty apparitions rattling chains. An anonymous portrait, a green velvet gown, a porcelain doll, even an entry in a library catalogue can open the way to nightmare.
But her work is forgotten until her great-grandson, as a young boy in Mawson, Australia, learns how to open the secret drawer in his mother’s room. There he finds a manuscript, and from the moment his mother catches him in the act, Gerard Freeman’s life is irrevocably changed. What is the invisible, ever-present threat from which his mother strives so obsessively to protect him? And why should stories written a century ago entwine themselves ever more closely around events in his own life?
More manuscripts come to light, hinting at his mother’s role in a catastrophe whose outlines he can only glimpse. A mysterious benefactor, and the prospect of union with his elusive penfriend Alice, seem to promise fairy-tale rewards, even as the sense of a monstrous pattern completing itself around him grows stronger.
In John Harwood’s astonishingly assured first novel, Gerard’s quest to unveil the mystery that shrouds his family, and his life, will lead him from Mawson to London, to a long-abandoned house and the terror of- a ghost story come alive. Darkly comic, fraught with the perils of reading, The Ghost Writerdraws us into a labyrinth where spellbinding horror lurks at every turn.
About The Author
John Harwood grew up in Hobart and studied literature and philosophy at the universities of Tasmania and Cambridge. He has published biography, political journalism, satire and poetry. The Ghost Writer is his first novel.
Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.
The Ghost Writer
(Jonathan Cape Pbk,
2004)
Pbk Apr 04
The Ghost Writer
by John Harwood
