Ghostland

In Search of a Haunted Country

By: Edward Parnell

Narrated by: Sam Woolf

‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare

‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow 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.

©2019 Edward Parnell (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"Ghostland is a delicious, creepy, gothic gazetteer to a British landscape filled with folkloric, literary and filmic spirits, avian auguries, and natural history and a deeply touching personal grief that speaks to the hauntedness of childhood memory and teenage dreams. Obsessive, possessive, nostalgic, an act of vivid retrieval - this is a uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature." (Philip Hoare)

"A marvellous blend of travel writing, history and grief memoir, Ghostland provides not only a seance with the author’s lost family, but also a premonition of his dazzling literary future." (Paul Willetts, author of Members Only, filmed as The Look of Love)

"A skillful and intriguing weaving together, less of haunted houses as of haunted people, including MR James, Alan Garner, W G Sebald and the author himself, in places where the past has left its mark." (George Szirtes, author of The Photographer at Sixteen)

great work!

this was a strong piece of writing. very interesting and evocative as both a literature review and as a family chronicle