The Ghost Writer [Hardcover]

John Harwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 5, 2004

A tantalizing tale of suspense and family secrets that weaves Victorian ghost stories into the present – where they start to come true

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. And 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.

(20040704)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Cornish prayer: "From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!" is an appropriate invocation when reading The Ghost Writer, John Harwood’s debut novel. It is a rousing good ghost story, with many twists and turns, rather like taking apart a Russian matryoshka nesting doll.

Gerard Freeman, at age ten, 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, whose grounds she describes as much the way Staplefield looked. They go through young adulthood together, in letters only, thousands of miles apart, eventuallydeclaring 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

From Publishers Weekly

Sly nods to spooky literary spinsters—Henry James's Miss Jessel and Dickens's Miss Havisham—set the tone for this confident debut, a gothic suspense novel with a metatextual spin. Gerard Freeman grows up on the windswept southern coast of Australia in the late 20th century with a controlling mother strangely silent about the details of her childhood in England. His only solace is steadfast English pen friend, Alice, to whom he confides everything. What was Gerard's mother, Phyllis, hoping to escape when she left England? The protagonist slowly pieces together his mother's past with the aid of short stories written by his great-grandmother, Viola. These cunning tales, filled with supernatural occurrences and séances, are seamlessly embedded in the main narrative, offering Gerard—and readers—enticing clues into his troubled family's history. After Phyllis's death, her newly liberated son travels to England, hoping to learn more and to pursue elusive Alice. As he searches through the country house his mother inhabited long ago, Gerard finds past and present fusing in horrifying fashion. In the hands of a lesser novelist, sustaining several plot lines might have been difficult. But the novel links textual investigation and sublimated passion, building to a satisfying, unexpected ending.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition, First Printing. edition (July 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151010749
• ISBN-13: 978-0151010745
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (132 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,182,127 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

146 of 154 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A page turner that may leave you feeling mentally deficient, July 20, 2004

By 

SGW "Opinionated Reader" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ghost Writer (Hardcover)

I bought "The Ghost Writer" after reading several glowing reviews in my local newspaper and online. I'm a sucker for gothic ghostie stories, and was hoping this would be worth the hardcover price.

AND IT WAS...almost. Actually, I've never had this kind of reaction to a book before. This is my first Amazon review, and I'm writing it because this book elicited enough of a passionate, if completely confused, reaction in me. So maybe that does make it worth the price.

From the first few pages, I absolutely could not put this book down. I abandoned chores, evening television and my signifcant other in pursuit of discovering the next plot revelation and how everything would tie together. Others have relayed the details of the plot, so I won't go into them here. But I found all the characters to be completely attention-worthy; at least in within the gothic genre (okay, this isn't "Atonement" or "Madame Bovary"). The "stories within the story", that is, the ghost stories written by Gerard's grandmother, Viola, are also quite wonderful. They are able to stand alone as compelling and enchanting short gothic stories.

I was turning pages as fast as I could.

And then I got to the last chapter. I read it once. Then twice. Then I went back and read the two previous chapters. I didn't get it. Sometimes, when you have been lucky enough to find a real page turner, you may be reading a little too fast and miss important stuff. That's what I assumed happened to me. I put the book down and went back to it the next day, rereading the last quarter. I was still baffled. I reread the last quarter again. What happened? What did those last few mumbled remarks by The Character In The Last Chapter mean? Did they indicate insanity? Were they revelations? If so, how were The Character In The Last Chapter's actions carried out in the past? How did The Character In The Last Chapter obtain The Important Item In The Attic? (List of more detailed, plot-revealing questions continues offline) So... I did some online research and discovered others had this same reaction. I felt a little better...sort of.

I would LOVE to go into more detail, but that would force me to basically make this review a whole bunch of evil SPOILERS. And that's just not fair. Let me just say that the ending leaves much to be desired (unless I've just suddenly suffered serious brain dysfunction and can no longer analyze plot like I used to). BUT...I suspect this would be a FANTASTIC book club book. Everybody would have their own theories, and there would be a lot of arguing and screaming and wailing, and isn't that what a good book club is all about?

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite books, EVER - (and YES the ending makes sense and has a fabulous twist that most people miss!), August 10, 2004

By 

sb-lynn (Santa Barbara, California United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Ghost Writer (Hardcover)

This is an astounding book. It is multi-layered and moody. It is terrific fun.

The story is about a young man named Gerard, born in Australia to a very strange mother who tells the young boy stories of her childhood. When Gerard discovers a strange photo of a beautiful woman hidden in her drawer, his mother becomes horrified, and stops her stories, and the boy is left to wonder about her past and why she is so reluctant to share it with him.

This novel is full of intrique and deception, and we are told some truly frightening ghost stories written by his great-grandmother, Viola.

Okay, here is the thing....when I first read this book, I was confused as to the ending, like so many reviewers here. So I read it again, and I figured it out. This story does makes sense, the author doesn't cheat, and there are answers to most of the big questions. It is a brilliant story filled with twists and full of irony and chilling retribution.

Each ghost story has a relevance to the book, and the overall tone and use of layering and deception is stunning. This book will stay with you for a long time.

This is my favorite book this year, and I am going to recommend it to everyone. Read it carefully, and if you are still confused, read it again. I promise you it will be worth it, and you will agree with me that this is a brilliant, complex novel deserving of a big audience.

71 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stylish, Atmospheric Ghost Story, June 23, 2004

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (2008 HOLIDAY TEAM)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ghost Writer (Hardcover)

In his debut novel, John Harwood creates an eerily psychological horror story with a nod (and a wave) to Victorian literature. As the novel begins in Australia, young Gerard discovers hidden away in his mother's possessions a strange photograph and a book. His mother swoops down on him with fury, snatching the belongings from him and hiding them away where Gerard cannot find them, refusing to tell him of her past. Soon thereafter, he begins a secret correspondence with a crippled English girl named Alice, and her letters rescue him emotionally from the bleak surroundings in his Australian home. As he matures, he falls in love with Alice, who won't let him see her for fear he'll feel sorry for her. As he learns that the book his mother has hidden away contained a ghost story written by his grandmother Viola, which Harwood presents in full, Gerard confides even more deeply in Alice. Viola's lengthy - and thoroughly creepy - stories seem like separate entities until Gerard discovers some disturbing connections. Upon his mother's death, he sets out to England to finally meet up with his almost-healed Alice and to settle family matters. What he doesn't count on, however, is that nothing, not even his own senses, can be trusted. Even if the reader solves much of the mystery before it is revealed, the ending has all the force it should, thanks to Harwood's highly visual description and talent with suspense.

Harwood does a marvelous job of embedding the mannered ghost stories within Gerard's story, and the stories-within-a-story works exceptionally well in his hands. The tales are so throat-grabbing by themselves that I forgot at times that they were but segments of the whole. The effect is truly eerie as details from them begin to surface in Gerard's plot. Because the author's debt to Henry James' THE TURN OF THE SCREW is obvious well before he makes reference to it, I wished he had just let the style and the allusions to speak for themselves instead of pointing them out. His acknowledgment of Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS is even less successful. I overlooked these lapses simply because I could not willingly put this novel aside.

This is not Stephen King-type horror but something more elegant and literary. This moody, stylish debut will capture your imagination for hours at a time. Especially if you like creepiness, you'll love this tale of multiple hauntings and mystery.