The ghost story comes alive in a spellbinding first novel. Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s whose work lies 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? Gerard's quest to unveil the mystery that shrouds his family, and his life, will lead him from Mawson to London, to a long-abandoned house and the terror of a ghost story comes alive. A compelling, atmospheric and well-crafted story - Guardian . An elegant homage to the Victorian ghost story tradition-Makes your flesh creep - The Times . Irresistible - Structured like a haunted mansion - Observer . Harwood is enviable skilled, handling pacing, delivery and plot with assurance and sly humour - The Ghost Writer has powerful moments and - a delicacy and tenderness that make it wonderfully readable - Times Literary Supplement . Its complexities provoke a feverish breathlessness-Well written and subtly constructed - Ruth Rendell, Sunday Times . John Harwood was born in Hobart, Tasmania. Educated in Tasmania and Cambridge, he went on to become Head of the School of English and Drama at Flinders University, Adelaide. He is the author of two books of criticism, Olivia Shakespeare and W. B. Yeats and Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation . This is his first novel.