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The Anatomy of Ghosts (Hardback)
Short Description for The Anatomy of Ghosts1786, Jerusalem College Cambridge. The ghost of Sylvia Whichcote is rumoured to be haunting Jerusalem since disturbed fellow-commoner, Frank Oldershaw, claims to have seen the dead woman prowling the grounds. Desperate to salvage her son's reputation, Lady Anne Oldershaw employs John Holdsworth to investigate.
Full description- Publisher: Michael Joseph Ltd
- Published: 02 September 2010
- Format: Hardback 480 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Crime
- ISBN 13: 9780718147518 ISBN 10: 0718147510
- Sales rank: 351,305
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Reviews for The Anatomy of Ghosts
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A tale of ghosts and frauds
Why do we think only the dead haunt us...for the living are just as good at it?
Andrew Taylor?s latest novel The Anatomy of Ghosts is a masterful historical crime fiction, a captivating ghost story, and an intriguing meditation on the nature of haunting.
Set in 1785, the story follows John Holdsworth, a level-headed bookseller residing by the Thames London, as he attempts to solve the mystery of a drowned woman, and rationalise a ghost sighting at Cambridge University.
For the University?s repute, the haunting is scandalous and damaging. For Holdsworth, the drowning bears disconcerting similarities to his wife?s recent drowning, for which he feels responsible.
Although he has always believed that those who prey on the credulous with their tales of ghosts are nothing more than frauds, when Holdsworth is forced to confront his own ghosts, both living and dead, he begins to consider that there is more to their anatomy than the mere shimmering ethereal apparitions espoused by children and the uneducated.
The novel is replete with idiosyncratic and memorable characters, such as John Floyd, aka Tom Turdman, the night-soil man and finder of discarded memories and excreted secrets and Philip Whichcote, the unscrupulous leader of the sordid and restricted Holy Ghost Club (based on the infamous Hellfire Clubs of Cambridge and Oxford).
As with his bestselling title The American Boy (2003 winner of the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger award) Taylor employs a credible lexis; he delivers a convincing representation of eighteenth-century English society, both privileged and abused.
The Anatomy of Ghosts offers a fascinating inquiry into human experiences, both real and imagined, which are inescapably tainted by fear, remorse, and love. With rousing and controlled prose, Taylor reveals that hauntings?our fitful, nocturnal or waking dreams?are primarily comprised of our presiding emotions.
A marvellous, engaging, and multi-layered read. by lucy forbeswriteReview1b3t21Reviews21
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