The Ghost Writer - Softcover

Harwood, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224071130 ISBN 13: 9780224071130

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

One hot January afternoon in Mawson, Australia, a young boy sets out to burgle his mother's room. Today, he thinks, he will open the special drawer, the locked drawer that must contain secrets. And it does. But sometimes we keep secrets for a reason. Sometimes a secret is there to hold those we love safe. Twenty years on, an onlooker would see in Gerard Freeman the boy he once was; a little more timid and unworldly, perhaps, but essentially the same solitary, serious child. Gerard has not left Mawson - he works as a librarian at the university - but he now lives for only two things: his crippled penfriend Alice, whom he has never met, but for whom he yearns with all his heart, and the manuscript he found in that locked drawer. For within those pages were the first hints at the terrible story that haunted his mother and, finally, destroyed her. And there must be other manuscripts which will contain the key, if only he can find them. In John Harwood's deliciously clever first novel, Gerard's quest to unveil the mystery that shrouds his family, and his life, will take him from Mawson to London, from the safety of his books to the terror of a ghost story come alive.

About this title

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

Review:

‘A wonderful, compulsive, clever, fascinating, eerie, thrilling book. I couldn’t stop reading once I had begun... A tour de force.’ -- Patricia Duncker

‘Makes your flesh creep.’ -- The Times

‘The Ghost Writer has ... a delicacy and tenderness that makes it wonderfully readable.’ -- The TLS

‘The Ghost Writer is irresistible, pushing all the genre’s gothic buttons and casting a convincingly Dickensian pall.’ -- The Observer

‘[Harwood] has a gift for creating suspense, apparently effortlessly, as if it belongs in the nature of fiction.’ -- Ruth Rendell, The Sunday Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0224071130
• ISBN 13: 9780224071130
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384