The Ghost Writer

By: John Harwood

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Paperback | 1 February 2004

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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.

Industry Reviews

Gerard Freeman grew up in Australia listening to his mother's reminiscences of her idyllic English childhood. The tales stopped abruptly when she caught her son reading a ghost story that he had discovered locked in her bedside cabinet. Years later, Gerard travels to England, driven by a desire to finally meet a childhood penpal and by a curiosity to visit the places about which his mother has become strangely reticent. The unearthing of more ghostly yarns, written by an ancestor, leads him to question his mother's account of the past and drags him towards a showdown with a vengeful spirit. 'The Ghost Writer' is Tasmanian author John Harwood's first novel. It is an admirably creepy piece of work, building the tension subtly until the terrifying climax. The unsettling impact of the book is created as much by suspicion, fear, and jealousy, the everyday spectres that haunt our lives, as by any manifestations of the supernatural world, and is all the more powerful for that. (Kirkus UK)

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Fiction Fantasy Fiction Horror & Ghost Stories Modern & Contemporary Fiction

“For those of us who love the tradition of literary high
Victorian Gothic –
The Ghost Writer is a feast, but you don’t need any prior knowledge of these other writers to savor the pure pleasure of reading this book.
The fissures in the text that let in a gust of modernity – computers, emails – just lift it into real, pure horror.
It is also mordantly funny!
That is sheer genius – to make me terrified and laughing all at once.
A tour de force.” –
Author of Seven Tales of Sex and Death “
Harwood has an extraordinary knack of feeling
His way into the style, vocabulary and characteristic
Preoccupations of the great ghost story writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries
He never puts a foot wrong
The skill and verve of these stories are undeniable and irresistible
Harwood is an expert at pacing his narrative, generating
suspense and conjuring up things that go bump in the night.”
– Sydney Morning Herald
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

The Ghost Writer

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