Product Description

The ghost story comes alive in a spellbinding first novel. Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s whose work lies 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? 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 comes alive. "A compelling, atmospheric and well-crafted story" - "Guardian". "An elegant homage to the Victorian ghost story tradition-Makes your flesh creep" - "The Times". "Irresistible - Structured like a haunted mansion" - "Observer". "Harwood is enviable skilled, handling pacing, delivery and plot with assurance and sly humour - "The Ghost Writer" has powerful moments and - a delicacy and tenderness that make it wonderfully readable" - "Times Literary Supplement". "Its complexities provoke a feverish breathlessness-Well written and subtly constructed" - Ruth Rendell, "Sunday Times". John Harwood was born in Hobart, Tasmania. Educated in Tasmania and Cambridge, he went on to become Head of the School of English and Drama at Flinders University, Adelaide. He is the author of two books of criticism, "Olivia Shakespeare and W. B. Yeats" and "Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation". This is his first novel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #984634 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Ghost Writer, John Harwood's debut novel, is a rousing story with many twists and turns--rather reminiscent of taking apart a Russian matryoshka nesting doll. Gerard Freeman, aged 10, sneaks into his mother's room and unlocks a secret drawer, only to find a picture of a woman he has never seen before, but one that he will find again and again. His mother discovers him and gives him the beating of his life. Why this excessive reaction? She is a worried, paranoid, thin and fretful type with an "anxious, haunted look". By tale's end, we know why.

Phyllis Freeman, Gerard's mother, was happiest when speaking fondly of Staplefield, her childhood home, where there were things they "didn't have in Mawson [Australia]--chaffinches and mayflies and foxgloves and hawthorn, coopers and farriers and old Mr Bartholomew who delivered fresh milk and eggs to their house with his horse and cart." It's the sort of childhood idyll that the timid and lonely Gerard believes in and longs for. He strikes up a correspondence with an English penfriend, Alice Jessel, when he is 13 and a half, living in a desolate place with a frantic mother and a silent father. She is his age, her parents were killed in an accident and she has been crippled by it. She now lives in an institution, and her description of the grounds sounds much like his mother's description of Staplefield. They go through young adulthood together, in letters only, thousands of miles apart, eventually declaring their love for one another.

Interwoven with the narrative of Alice and Gerard's letters are real ghost stories, the creation of Gerard's great-grandmother, Viola. At first, they seem to be scary Victorian tales of the supernatural. Then we see that they have a spooky way of mirroring, or preceding, events in real life, off the page. Gerard comes upon them, one by one, in mysterious ways, but clearly something, or someone, is leading him. The stories seem to implicate his mother in some nefarious goings-on, but the truth is far worse than Gerard imagines.

Any more would be telling too much. Turn on all the lights in the house when you settle down with this one, and plan to spend a long time reading because you will be lost in the story immediately. --Valerie Ryan, Amazon.com

Ruth Rendell, Sunday Times
'Its complexities provoke a feverish breathlessness...Well written and subtly constructed'

Ruth Rendell, Sunday Times
'Its complexities provoke a feverish breathlessness...Well written and subtly constructed'

Customer Reviews

Elegant, spellbinding terror.
The Ghost Writer is a superbly crafted,ingeniously constructed, elegantly written supernatural novel, a compulsive page-turner which will be enjoyed by connoisseurs of the genre and the more general reader alike. Certainly no afficionado of the Golden Age ghost story---the world of M.R. James, Vernon Lee, 'The Turn of the Screw' and Arthur Machen can afford to miss this novel, but I would also recommend it to anyone who enjoys a growing feeling of unease and spooky suspense. Gerard Mawson begins by being intrigued by the discovery of the ghost stories written by his great-grandmother, Viola Hatherley, in the 1890s and ends by being drawn into a web of horror that will have the hairs rising on the back of your neck and will prompt you to check inside your bedroom cupboards before turning off the light. One of the pleasures of this novel is the way in which Viola's fin de siecle stories are woven into the main narrative, and indeed the quality of the stories themselves, which might have come from a long lost copy of The Yellow Book ---the first story, Seraphina, for example, is an elegant pastiche with overtones of 'Dorian Gray'. But Viola's stories are not merely there for decoration----read this novel to discover how Gerard's reading interconnects with his life with chilling results. Don't miss this fabulous book!

Gothic Ghost Tale
The story is about Gerard, a young boy growing up in Australia, the country his mother came to after leaving Staplefield, the country home in England in which she grew up. She tells Gerard very little about her past so one day Gerard unlocks her desk and finds some personal papers. For this his mother beats him but still refuses to speak of her past.

Gerard eventually finds a pen pal called Alice to who he pours out his heart. They fall in love and so begins a courtship that is created on paper. Alice repeatedly refuses to meet him, explaining that she is a paraplegic but with a cure in sight, so wants to wait until she can walk again.

Gerard continues to try and discover more about his background and finds a ghost story written by his Grandmother and learns that she wrote 3 more too. As he grows up he is amazed to realise that his Gran's stories reflect his real life in an uncanny manner.
The ending to this story is when he finally meets Alice and the conclusion is terrifyingly spooky and so desperately saddening.

A terrific Victorian gothic style ghost story. Full of mystery, suspense, romance and surprises. There are twists and turns all the way through that leaves the reader desperately turning the pages as fast as possible. Extremely well written with amazing imagery, this was a superbly haunting tale that I truly enjoyed.

"Ghosts or hallucinations--did it make any difference?
One of the most intricate and haunting ghost stories since Turn of the Screw, which it resembles in many ways, The Ghost Writer is captivating, filled with romance, Gothic twists, melodramatic surprises, vibrant imagery, and a series of rich and overlapping stories within stories. Complex and carefully constructed, it is also hugely entertaining, totally involving the reader in good, old-fashioned haunted happenings which turn out to be even eerier than they appear at first.

Young Gerard Hugh Freeman grows up in rural Mawson, Australia, a bleak place that is in marked contrast to Staplefield, the English country house where his mother grew up. Extremely private, she has revealed almost nothing else about her family background, and when Gerald, curious, opens her locked bureau and finds some personal papers, his angry mother refuses to speak about her past at all. Gerald, one the "legions of the lost: the swots, the cowards," eventually finds a pen pal in whom he confides everything, Alice Jessell, a paralyzed English girl whose parents are dead.

Continuing to investigate his mother, Gerald eventually discovers among her belongings an eerie ghost story written by Viola Hatherley, who may or may not be his grandmother, one of four stories she published in "The Chameleon," a short-lived British magazine. As Gerard grows up, he eventually uncovers the remaining three ghost stories by Viola, all as fascinating as the first, and as the reader discovers when these stories are inserted into the novel, the lives of Gerald and his family overlap with the plots of these stories. When he is in his thirties, and still pursing Alice, he finally visits the place in England that appears to be his mother's "Staplefield," and the details of his mother's life suddenly combine with Viola's four vibrant ghost stories to precipitate an intriguing conclusion.

Harwood is a fine writer, giving detailed physical descriptions and creating unforgettable images which reveal similarities among people, surroundings, and events in Viola's four ghost stories. The mystery and suspense begin on the first page, and increase geometrically as Gerard tries to solve his questions while creating even more mysteries. The parallels among the stories and with Gerard's life keep the reader on edge, trying to figure out who Gerard is, how he might fit into these stories, and even whether Gerard's life is a story manipulated by some great, unknown storyteller. Like The Turn of the Screw, this novel leaves the reader with questions--and like that brilliant novel, haunts the reader long after the fun has concluded. Mary Whipple