Books of the Month

'The Ghost Writer' by John Harwood

MAY 2006

Sometimes you just can't beat an old-fashioned spooky story. Harwood's debut novel is a gripping literary mystery with twisting plots and sub-plots aplenty.

As a boy growing up in hot and dusty small town Australia, two things stand out in Gerard Freeman's life. The first is what he finds when snooping in his mother's chest of drawers one day - a photograph of an unknown woman, and a ghost story by his great-grandmother. When she catches him red-handed though, he receives the beating of his life, an over-reaction he can't quite reconcile to the crime. The second is the penfriend he begins writing to in England, wheelchair-bound orphan Alice Jessell. As they continue to write to each other over the years, an affection deepens into love. Gerard plans to visit England as soon as he's able, but Alice wants to wait until she can walk again, and keeps him hanging on.

After his mother's death however, Gerard does travel to London, to try and solve the mystery of the photograph, and the story, and their connection to the idyllic childhood tales his mother used to tell him - before she caught him with the photograph - of the time she spent at Staplefield in rural Sussex. An advertisement in The Times has unearthed someone with promising information. Meanwhile, as Gerard tries to trace his family history in research rooms and archives, his long-awaited meeting with Alice draws ever closer. But the more ghost stories by his great-grandmother he discovers, the more the past seems to be a sinister mirror of her fiction, and when events lead him to an abandoned house in Hampstead, the connections between everything he has learned quickly start taking a more dangerous turn.

Susan Tranter

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