Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua – a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within. Scarlet – a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order – has announced to Beverley – her aged grandmother – that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright – he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but she’s not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble. And neither are the kehua outside the window. The sins and traumas of the past haunt us all. Call them hungry ghosts, grateful dead, dybbuks, kelpies, poltergeists, furies or kehua, we carry them with us – across continents, oceans, decades and generations. Quite how they became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writer’s tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them…
Editorial Reviews
Review
* CHALCOT CRESCENT was a sensation: ― *
Weldon back to her best – an apocalypse-very-soon-from-now delivered with her trademark warm-hearted cynicism and bone-dry wit. ―
Daily Mail
Reads like a first novel… it’s so fresh and vibrant and funny. The funniest dystopian novel I’ve ever read. And I don’t think it’s going to date. ―
Boyd Hilton
Weldon’s mischievous blend of fact and fiction produces a hybrid that is at once futuristic satire, tragedy and tongue-in-cheek memoir… The plot is bonkers, but enormous fun… A persuasive fable: sinister, clever, funny and vintage Weldon. ―
Independent
I just adored it… Hugely funny and surprisingly sinister — Sadie Jones
Sparkles with wit and acute observation ―
Guardian
Weldon’s impish sense of humour and gimlet-eyed social observations stand out ―
Sunday Times
Really rather bonkers. Exceptionally good, but bonkers ―
Daily Telegraph
This potent brew of social comment, dystopian satire, viscious comedy and vintage Weldon wisdom is a marvellous ride ―
The Times
About the Author
FAY WELDON was brought up in New Zealand. Writer of the first ever episode of Upstairs, Downstairs and current Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, Weldon is best known for her novels Praxis, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Worst Fears. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE. She lives on a hilltop in Dorset with her husband.
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