Pre-order | The Haunting of Lamb House

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, twelve book series and several highly regarded sequels to Jane Austen novels. She worked with illustrators such as Quentin Blake on her Arabel and Mortimer series, and Jan Pienkowski for A Necklace of Raindrops, and her work has been adapted for film and television too. She won many awards during her lifetime, including the Lewis Carroll prize and the Edgar Alan 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 20th century.

Alex Preston was born in 1979 and lives on the Sussex/Kent border. He 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 co-founded the Corfu Literary Festival. He studied English under Tom Paulin at Hertford College, Oxford, and holds a PhD on Violence in the Modern Novel from UCL.

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 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.