Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country
English
By (author): Edward Parnell
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2020
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 childrens fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebalds The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swifts Waterland to the archetypal folk horror film The Wicker Man
Ghostland is Parnells 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.
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