Book excerpt: “As a study of fiction, femininity and family it is bursting with intelligence and fire”—from the award-winning author of Death of a She Devil (The Telegraph). Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption, and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua—a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within. Scarlet—a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order—has announced to Beverley, her aged grandmother, that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright, he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but she’s not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble. How the kehua became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writer’s tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them. “A haunting book . . . The novel is a spirited triumph: adroit, affecting and bung-full of genuine humour and ideas.” —The Guardian “Weldon crafts this traffic between spirit worlds with characteristic wit, and without sacrificing the intricacies of a family’s struggle to accept its past.” —Financial Times “Wonderfully wicked, highly readable.” —Independent