ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Ghost Story by Elisa Lodato #BlogTour
Ghost Story by Elisa Lodato is published by Manilla Press and available now in hardcover, eBook and audiobook. My thanks to the publishers for the review copy and to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for the place on the blog tour.
THE ISLAND IS ABANDONED. BUT SHE IS NOT ALONE . . .
Off the windswept coast of Scotland lies Finish Island, rugged and remote. Once a home, it now stands abandoned, a place of dark history and deep memory, a place that holds its stories close. Unable to write since her daughter’s death, it’s here that Seren comes to work, hoping that the solitude and silence will inspire her next novel.
But the island holds memories of its own, restless and unwilling to stay buried. As unsettling occurrences become even more bizarre and frightening, Seren starts seeing uncanny resonances between her past and the island’s history. There is something on this island, something ancient and unforgiving. Will Seren discover its secrets, before it’s too late?
I don’t think there’s any setting more likely to draw me into wanting to pick up a book than a remote island, especially a Scottish island. The combination of the beauty of the landscape and the often bleak sense that comes with being so cut off sparks something in my imagination.
Ghost Story is set mainly on the fictional island of Finish in the Outer Hebrides where writer Seren goes to try and gather enough inspiration to write a new novel. The book begins in Edinburgh where Seren is struggling to cope with a tragedy in her life. She then moves to Finish and settles in there but the island’s macabre history proves unsettling, even more so as Seren is the only inhabitant of the island and so she is mostly left alone with her own thoughts.
Seren’s time on the island is told in journal entries which I found really upped the pace and made this a book that I found very hard to put down. The writing is full of empathy and feeling, and the history of the island and what occurred there is beautifully woven into Seren’s own experiences. There were times when I wondered if she might prove to be an unreliable narrator but in the end I believed her story and the ghostly elements were executed so well that I believed in them too (and I don’t always).
I thought Ghost Story was a brilliant book. It’s eerie and tense, it has a fascinating historical back story running through it, the setting is perfectly drawn to be both stunning and sinister, and I loved the characterisations of both the good people and the not so good.
Elisa Lodato grew up in London and read English at Cambridge. Her debut novel, An Unremarkable Body, was longlisted for the 2016 Bath Novel Award and shortlisted for the 2018 Costa First Novel Award. Her second novel is The Necessary Marriage and Ghost Story is her latest novel. Elisa lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and two children.
