Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86925 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW
'I found it deliciously slow, gradually racheting up the tension to final violent denouement.'

Review
"A creepy, unputdownable book" (GOOD BOOK GUIDE )

Peter Guttridge, The Observer (15.4.07)
'Most impressive'

Customer Reviews

history never ends

I thoroughly enjoyed Ghostwalk, and for the first time I didn't hesitate to finish a book. Normally I linger on and find excuses not to end books, as it feels like closing a door on a newly found friend or departing from a place just when I start to know my way around.
With Ghostwalk it feels like the novel never ended.
Living in Cambridge and cycling daily past these ancient buildings and around the streets and commons, I find that Rebecca Stott's novel continues to linger in my imagination.
In the same way that history never ends and we will only know a truth of the events in the news today, when our children's children are reading about them in the history books, the novel gives you a possible end, but leaves history to print its own accounts.
Ghostwalk is a very clever novel that takes the modern sense of conspiracies, weaves historical events, scientific knowledge and the presence of the past into a compelling story. What could be an awfully complicated and intellectual read is a wonderful journey into our possible entanglement with another dimension.

Science, love, history and ghosts
I picked this up in the bookshop, having not heard of it or the author. And I loved it. The first chapter is one of the most gripping first chapters I have read and the author did well to hold my concentration for the entire book.

It is not a simple read, but the language is wonderful and the topic fascinating - basically it is about a current day love story and Newton's fascinating with alchemy. Set in Cambridge it is evocative of the city and even though I have not visited the city for many years I could imagine myself back there.

This is one of those books that captures the imagination and asks many questions. If you liked The Conjuror's Bird and The Time Traveller's Wife then you will like this too.

It delivers.
An intensely satisfying read - you wait a long time for a novel with the plot and the prose and the ideas at the same time. It feels like '50% extra FREE' whether you approach it as a literary novel or a mystery.

The task is huge. A murder mystery and love story unfold in tandem, shot through with meditations the nature of scientific inquiry, tangled with superstition in Newton's day and big business in ours. Alchemy, glassmaking and quantum physics sit alongside supernatural elements. With so many balls in the air I was ready to forgive a shaky resolution, but found instead a complete and surprising denouement.

What makes it work is authority. The voice has the conviction to sell an audacious plot, but also the brio of a writer carving out a new space. It has crime novel tension but skips most genre conventions - readers expecting the formulaic, or suspicious of elegant prose, will leave frustrated. Those up for something different will find a slightly decadent and thoroughly original treat.