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Reviews

"Joan Aiken has written a clever book, kindling a whole world of feeling out of small macabre details, presenting to the senses a series of apprehensions of reality which seem to touch a completeness beyond themselves. An impressive achievement; I shivered as I admired"
- The Guardian

"Joan Aiken's artful web of truth and fancy is divided into three histories of haunting - the first employs Aiken's considerable skill in a vivid evocative rendering of the old town of Rye when the house was built...followed by the twenty years of Henry James' residence. The end is worth waiting for...where E.F.Benson encounters hideous apparitions and even an exorcism in the last enthralling twenty pages"
- Miranda Seymour, Times Literary Supplement

"Aiken has conjured up a deliciously scary ghost story...her mastery of style serves her well in the creation of three separate voices. Those familiar with Henry James's writing especially The Turn of The Screw will derive special enjoyment from this novel, but there are shivers enough for any reader willing to acknowledge the possibility of ghosts and the reality of evil"
- U.S. Library Journal

"In three interlocking ghost stories this veteran British novelist places a fictional haunting within the history of a real house, and displays a masterly way with several contrasting narrative styles, sympathetically evoking some ghostly presences...the wayward spirit of the house and the growing number of literary presences which gradually take possession"
- Publisher's Weekly

CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Aiken (1924–2004) was the daughter of Pulitzer prize-winning American poet Conrad Aiken, and started writing aged five. She published over 100 books for children and adults, including the acclaimed Wolves of Willoughby Chase, 12 book series and several highly regarded sequels to Jane Austen novels. This novel is the second Manderley Press edition of her work: Tales of London Town, a collection of her short stories set in a magical other London, was published in 2024. During her lifetime, she worked with illustrators Quentin Blake on her Arabel and Mortimer series, and Jan Pieńkowski for A Necklace of Raindrops, and her work has been adapted for film and TV. She won many awards during her lifetime, including the Lewis Carroll prize and the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and also received an MBE from Queen Elizabeth II for her services to Children’s Literature. Joan Aiken continues to be recognised as a consummate storyteller, and one of the best-loved authors of the twentieth century. 

Alex Preston was born in Worthing in 1979 and is the prize-winning author of five novels and a book of nature writing. He writes for the Financial Times, The Economist and Harper’s Bazaar, and he co-founded the Corfu Literary Festival. Alex studied English under Tom Paulin at Hertford College, Oxford, and holds a PhD on Violence in the Modern Novel from UCL. He lives in Kent, close to the Sussex border, not far from the town of Rye, and has long had a fascination for the town and its history and surroundings. The landscape of the Rye and Winchelsea marshes have inspired his writing and essays, and he has described the area in nature writing about the Sussex-Kent countryside, as well as in his historical novel Winchelsea (2022). His forthcoming novel Rye is a sequel to Winchelsea and tells the story of the town under threat of Napoleonic invasion.

Annabel Pearl was born in Liverpool and studied Fine Art at Newcastle University, Central Saint Martins, and Wimbledon College of Art. Known for using a variety of media including photography, her art practice explores the role that objects play in social relationships. A set of Pearl’s cyanotypes were recently acquired by the Imperial War Museum, and these works also feature in the art historian Carol Mavor's Blue Mythologies. Her debut novel, Florilegia, was published in 2021. She has created joyful illustrations for companies such as Floris, Hermes, Laduree, Pentreath and Hall, Kettles Yard, Lulu Guinness and Claridges, among many others. She also illustrated the first Manderley Press edition of Joan Aiken’s work: a collection of short stories for children set in a magical ‘other’ London – Tales of London Town.

Lizza Aiken was born into a family of writers: her mother was the celebrated author Joan Aiken and her grandfather the poet Conrad Aiken. However she rebelled against the family trade by studying mime in Paris with Étienne Decroux and Jacques Lecoq. After touring all over Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, she settled in Highgate, London, and had two children. She went on to direct Youth theatre, and wrote screenplays for Children’s BBC TV based on Joan Aiken’s popular Arabel & Mortimer stories. Lizza now curates the Joan Aiken literary estate and has created the official website: www.joanaiken.com