Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

‘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. Edward Parnell's Ghostland is a best-selling exploration of death and bereavement, told through a unique blend of biography and autobiography. The book delves into the cultural and regional figures that have shaped our understanding of these topics, making it a must-read for anyone interested in literary explorations of life's most challenging subjects. For fans of Roger Clarke (A Natural History of Ghosts), Peter Ross (A Tomb With a View – The Stories & Glories of Graveyards), Thomas Waters (Cursed Britain), Stephen Prince (A Year In The Country), and Merlin Coverley (Hauntology).