The Ghost Writer

Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s but her work is forgotten until her great-grandson, a young boy growing up in Mawson, Australia, discovers 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. 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 Writer draws us into a labyrinth where spellbinding horror lurks at every turn.