The Ghost Writer
  • Published: 1 June 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099460824
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $19.99

The Ghost Writer

Formats & editions
EBook
15 Feb 2011
Paperback
1 Jun 2005
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'Its complexities provoke a feverish breathlessness. Well written and subtly constructed' Ruth Rendell, Sunday Times

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 come alive.
  • Published: 1 June 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099460824
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

John Harwood

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 Shakespear and W. B. Yeats and Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation and the novels The Ghost Writer and The Séance.

portrait photo of John Harwood

Also by John Harwood

The Asylum
The Seance
See all

Praise for The Ghost Writer

Atmospheric debut novel

Emma Hagestadt, The Independent

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
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