The Seance

Front Cover
Jonathan Cape, 2008 - Fiction - 293 pages
'Sell the Hall unseen; burn it to the ground and plough the earth with salt, if you will; but never live there...'London, the 1880s. A young girl grows up in a household marked by death, her father distant, her mother in perpetual mourning for the child she lost. Desperate to coax her mother back to health, Constance Langton takes her to a s¬ance. Perhaps they will find comfort from beyond the grave. But that s¬ance has tragic consequences. Constance is left alone, her only legacy a mysterious bequest will blight her life.So begins The S¬ance, John Harwood's brilliant second novel, a gripping, dark mystery set in late Victorian England. It is a world of apparitions, of disappearances and unnatural phenomena, of betrayal and blackmail and black-hearted villains - and murder. For Constance's bequest comes in two parts: a house, and a mystery. Years before a family disappeared at Wraxford Hall, a terrifying stately home near the Suffolk coast. Now Constance must find the truth behind the mystery, even at the cost of her life. Because without the truth, she is lost.

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About the author (2008)

John Harwood grew up in Hobart and studied literature and philosophy at the universities of Tasmania and Cambridge. He has published biography, political journalism, satire and poetry. He is the author of The Ghost Writer.

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