Ghostland

Edward Parnell lives near Norwich and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has been the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. His novel The Listeners was the winner of the Rethink New Novels Prize.

‘Ghostland is a delicious, creepy, gothic gazetteer to a British landscape filled with folkloric, literary and filmic spirits, avian auguries, and natural history and a deeply touching personal grief that speaks to the hauntedness of childhood memory and teenage dreams. Obsessive, possessive, nostalgic, an act of vivid retrieval – this is a uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare‘Psychogeography at is finest, Ghostland is a personal meditation on the primal power of the British landscape to shape literature, film and television that tunes into the core collective experience of the Haunted Generation’ Cathi Unsworth, author of Weirdo‘Part memoir of family to two parts brilliant excursion into folk-horror darkness and literary nooks and crannies’ Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts‘Ghostland is both haunting and entertaining, echoing with an enthusiast’s love for that which is out of kilter with the everyday; things not quite right glimpsed from the corner of the eye’ Stuart Maconie, Mail on Sunday‘A marvellous blend of travel writing, history and grief memoir, Ghostland provides not only a seance with the author’s lost family, but also a premonition of his dazzling literary future’ Paul Willetts, author of Members Only, filmed as The Look of Love‘A skilful and intriguing weaving together, less of haunted houses as of haunted people, including MR James, Alan Garner, W G Sebald and the author himself, in places where the past has left its mark’ George Szirtes, author of The Photographer at Sixteen‘His is a wonderfully evocative book, creating a sense of place and invoking the power of literature and nature.’ The Guardian‘Throughout this impeccably researched book, there is…a fascination with figures in a landscape glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.’ Literary Review