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The Ghost Writer by John Harwood
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The Ghost Writer (2004)

by John Harwood

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1,0835118,578 (3.47)72
Fiction. Mystery. HTML:

In this tantalizing tale of Victorian ghost stories and family secrets, timid, solitary librarian Gerard Freeman lives for just two things: his elusive pen pal Alice and a story he found hidden in his mother's drawer years ago. Written by his great-grandmother Viola, it hints at his mother's role in a sinister crime. As he discovers more of Viola's chilling tales, he realizes that they might hold the key to finding Alice and unveiling his family's mystery-or will they bring him the untimely death they seem to foretell?

Harwood's astonishing, assured debut shows us just how dangerous family skeletons-and stories-can be.

.
… (more)
Member:Alisha2335
Title:The Ghost Writer
Authors:John Harwood
Info:Publisher Unknown, Kindle Edition, 386 pages
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The Ghost Writer by John Harwood (2004)

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» See also 72 mentions

English (50)  Spanish (1)  All languages (51)
Showing 1-5 of 50 (next | show all)
The writing style and narration expertly create a #gothic tension, but the book is overlong and the wheels come entirely off in the convoluted ending of an already convoluted tale. Still, it was Harwood's first book and I'm game to give him another try.

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  Kim.Sasso | Aug 27, 2023 |
Definitely a different read than I'm use to. Was not easy getting into the book.
This was a giveaway book I won. ( )
  Nora57 | Jul 29, 2022 |
Cleverly written and very twisty plotting. However, I was not so enthralled with the story. Mind you, I totally went outside my comfort zone in reading a gothic-paranormal romance theme. I found the writing was clever and well-crafted. But the interleaving story structure with several manuscripts from one of the supporting character's collection of novels distracted me.

These episodic tales seemed to be unrelated to the plot and I couldn't reconcile their inclusion at all. The entire plot developed in a weirdly convoluted way. The ending seemed to just drop off a cliff. I think I was rather lost a few times in the twists. Not to imply another person wouldn't like the book, but verging on gothic-thriller, it is difficult to recommend. ( )
  SandyAMcPherson | Feb 9, 2022 |
A boy in Australia struggles under the rule of his overprotective mother but finds an outlet for his feelings in his penpal in England. As his relationship with his penpal becomes more serious through the years, his relationship with his mother becomes even more strained. When she dies, he is determined both to meet his love face-to-face and also to solve the mysteries in his mother's past. However, he's not prepared for how the two parts of his life are unexpectedly joined.
This is a strange but cool novel involving stories within stories, mysteries on every level, and a perfectly creepy gothic feel throughout. I'm still not completely clear on how some of the embedded stories relate to the whole, but overall it's a great read. ( )
  electrascaife | Feb 6, 2022 |
Wow, okay, so once I finally sat down to read this book it got so much better. This novel takes a little concentration. The main story concerns Gerard, a sort of sad sack Australian librarian who spends most of his life under the confining care of his mother who becomes mysteriously overbearing after the narrator, at age ten, finds a photograph and a letter locked away in his mother's vanity. Coincidentally, that was the same year Alice, his pen pal and, over time, "invisible lover" begins corresponding from England. This story is taken up mostly with Gerard trying to figure out a way to be with Alice, even though both his mother and Alice, herself, are resistant.

Throughout his journey to unite with Alice, Gerard comes across Gothic-style horror stories written by his Grandmother. These stories are really quite something and alone are worth reading the book. They are creepy and strange and just delightful.

This novel is really interesting in that it is good, not great for about the first 200 pages. Then beginning in the last 100 pages, it ramps up into "oh my, I have to keep reading this, I don't care what time it is." Then, in the last 5 pages, it kind of loses it. I'm still wondering if maybe I missed something. All told, I'm glad I read 'The Seance' by Harwood first. I loved that story, and I'm not sure I would have read it if I had started with this one. That said, I'm glad I read this one if for nothing else than those fantastic little horror stories. ( )
  JessicaReadsThings | Dec 2, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 50 (next | show all)
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» Add other authors (8 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
John Harwoodprimary authorall editionscalculated
Jackman, JenniferCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vance, SimonNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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for Robin and Deirdre
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I first saw the photograph on a hot January afternoon in my mother's bedroom.
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Her fingers twitched; she was drifting into sleep. I reached over with my other hand and picked up her book, so that it would not slide off and wake her. A battered Pan paperback: Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise. She must have read that one a dozen times. From bargain tables and goodwill stores she amassed a large collection of detective stories, all English and nothing after the 1950s: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Marjorie Allingham, Josephine Tey, Freeman Wills Crofts, Ernest Brahmah, J.J. Connington and more. She would alternate these with anything from Daphne Du Maurier to Elizabeth Bowen or Henry James, but beyond 'I think you'll like this, dear' or 'not as good as so-and-so, I thought,' she never discussed her reading, which - or so I sometimes imagined - had come to revolve more and more around the lost country-house world of her childhood with Viola at Staplefield.
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Wikipedia in English (1)

Fiction. Mystery. HTML:

In this tantalizing tale of Victorian ghost stories and family secrets, timid, solitary librarian Gerard Freeman lives for just two things: his elusive pen pal Alice and a story he found hidden in his mother's drawer years ago. Written by his great-grandmother Viola, it hints at his mother's role in a sinister crime. As he discovers more of Viola's chilling tales, he realizes that they might hold the key to finding Alice and unveiling his family's mystery-or will they bring him the untimely death they seem to foretell?

Harwood's astonishing, assured debut shows us just how dangerous family skeletons-and stories-can be.

.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Growing up in a small Australian town, Gerard Freeman loves to hear his mother talk about her idyllic childhood in an English country manor. But she swears that she will never return to England and refuses to tell him what happened to her family, though she is clearly terrified of some invisible yet ever-present threat. One hot afternoon, he waits until she is napping, then creeps into her bedroom to break open the drawer that's always locked, the one that he hopes holds all her secrets...

Twenty years later, Gerard has not left home — he works as a librarian — but he lives for just two things: his English penfriend Alice, for whom he yearns with all his heart, and the ghost story he found in his mother's drawer all those years ago. Written by his great-grandmother Viola, it hints at the terrible crime that haunted his mother and finally destroyed her. And as his search for more of Viola's chilling tales leads him to London, Gerard realizes that the stories might hold the key to finding Alice as well as unveiling his family's mystery. Or are they leading him directly to the untimely death they seem to foretell?

Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s. Yet the eerie presences in her tales of bohemian London, of aspiring young women and struggling artists, are not musty apparitions rattling chains. An anonymous portrait, a green velvet gown, a porcelain doll, even an entry in a library catalogue can open the way to nightmare. But her work is 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?" More manuscripts come to light, hinting at his mother's role in a catastrophe whose outlines he can only glimpse. A mysterious benefactor, and the prospect of union with his elusive penfriend Alice, seem to promise fairy-tale rewards, even as the sense of a monstrous pattern completing itself around him grows stronger.

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