Winifred Rudge travels to London to research a new novel about Jack the Ripper. Arriving at her ancestral house (once owned by the purported model for Ebenezer Scrooge), Winnie finds her friend and stepcousin missing and a ghostly presence in his place. Scrooge, Jack, or a phantasm of more arcane and insidious origin - what is haunting Winnie?
Children's book author Winifred Rudge travels to London to research an adult novel about a woman who is being haunted by Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival she finds that her stepcousin and old friend John Comestor has mysteriously disappeared, and a ghostly presence has taken over his apartment in the nineteenth-century terraced house once owned by Winnie's great-great-grandfather. Is it the ghost of the grandfather, who family legend claims was Charles Dickens' childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? The ghost of Jack the Ripper? Or a spirit from a more ancient age? Winnie finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of spectres and shades, some from her family's dim history and some from her own unremembered past.
In the spirit of A.S. Byatt's Possession and touching on "A Christmas Carol," "Peter Pan" and the legend of Jack the Ripper, Lost creates a rich fictional world that will thrill Gregory Maguire's eager audience.
E-book extras: The full text of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, plus reading group guide.
- ISBN10 0061748668
- ISBN13 9780061748660
- Publish Date 17 March 2009 (first published 2 October 2001)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Imprint Collins
- Format eBook
- Pages 352
- Language English