Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the 'sequestered places' of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands.

He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children's fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift's Waterland to the archetypal 'folk horror' film The Wicker Man... Ghostland is Parnell's moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists - and what is haunting him.

It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

"A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature." - Philip Hoare

"Subtle, moving and original" - Diana Setterfield

"A wonderful mmemoir, hauntingly different" - Mail on Sunday's Most-Essential Books of the Year

Format: Paperback, 480 pages
ISBN: 9780008271992
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 15 October, 2020
Weight: 414 g
Dimensions: 198x130x38 mm

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