The Ghost Writer_John Harwood

- The Miles Franklin Award for The Ghost Writer, longlisted 2005

- The Commonwealth Writers Prize The Ghost Writer, commended South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best First Book section, 2005

- International Horror Guild Award for The Ghost Writer, Best First Novel winner 2005

- Dracula Society Awards, Children of the Night Award for The Ghost Writer, winner 2004

- Aurealis Award for The Seance, Best Horror Novel 2008

John Harwood's The Ghost Writer is considered to be one of the best debut novels in its genre, a multilayered story that manages to be truly haunting, something few authors even try nowadays. The initial plot is intriguing enough: Gerard Freeman is a reclusive librarian living in Australia. For most of his life, his two primary relationships have been with his mother -- a English ex-pat with a haunted look who has long kept secrets from her son -- and with his unseen pen-pal Alice, who lives in England and is bed-ridden after an accident that killed her parents.
What starts off as an intriguing gothic-style tale takes its first turn early on, as Harwood inserts numerous (and eventually longer) ghost stories into the novel for Gerard to discover. At first, Gerard assumes that the stories, written by his grandmother, are merely diversions, but as the stories start getting longer and more complex, he notices the parallels between events in them and his life. He also notices the disturbing implication in the stories that his mother may have been involved in something sinister in her past.
But Harwood is too self-assured a writer to let that happen. The stories are every bit as essential to Gerard's life as anything Alice herself writes to him. And Harwood's writing, while deliberately set at the slow pace of most Victorian literature, is quietly wonderful, with moments like, "boys, I had learned from somewhere, were supposed to think their mothers were beautiful, but I suspected mine was not," popping up after a young Gerard discovers a secret picture of a beautiful woman that his mother had hidden. The small moments of wit contrast with the overall sense of dread Gerard feels as he discovers more of his grandmother's tales, and continues his quest to finally meet Alice. He doesn't waste time on the literary equivalent of cat scares, instead opting for a slower, often pages-long, build up of the idea that something is wrong, both in Gerard's life and in the lives of the characters he reads about.
(Source: Adam Lipkin, Bookslut.com)

Read, enjoy and seed!

(don't be fool like me, Polanski didn't use this for his movie :p )