Book description
A sinister Gothic tale in the tradition of The Woman in Black and The
Fall of the House of Usher
1891. In a remote and crumbling New England mansion, 12-year-old orphan
Florence is neglected by her guardian uncle and banned from reading.
Left to her own devices she devours books in secret and talks to herself
- and narrates this, her story - in a unique language of her own
invention. By night, she sleepwalks the corridors like one of the old
house's many ghosts and is troubled by a recurrent dream in which a
mysterious woman appears to threaten her younger brother Giles.
Sometimes Florence doesn't sleepwalk at all, but simply pretends to so
she can roam at will and search the house for clues to her own baffling past.
After the sudden violent death of the children's first governess, a
second teacher, Miss Taylor, arrives, and immediately strange phenomena
begin to occur. Florence becomes convinced that the new governess is a
vengeful and malevolent spirit who means to do Giles harm. Against this
powerful supernatural enemy, and without any adult to whom she can turn
for help, Florence must use all her intelligence and ingenuity to both
protect her little brother and preserve her private world.
Inspired by and in the tradition of Henry James' s The Turn of the
Screw, Florence & Giles is a gripping gothic page-turner told in a
startlingly different and wonderfully captivating narrative voice.
'Real atmosphere is increasingly rare in novels and here it is in
spades…A darkly glamorous tour de force.'
Wendy Holden, DAILY MAIL
'Harding rings enough ingenious changes on James's study of perversity
to produce his own full-blown Gothic horror tale. The climax of their
struggle… is genuinely exciting and shocking.' THE INDEPENDENT
'Florence and Giles is an elegant literary exercise worked out with the
strictness of a fugue: imagine Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
reworked by Edgar Allan Poe…Nothing prepares you for the chillingly
ruthless but inevitable finale.' THE TIMES
'A tight gothic thriller… The climax becomes unbearably tense. Florence
feels the horror of her situation "cheese-grating" her soul,
which is just how Harding leaves the reader feeling at the end of this
creepily suggestive story.' FINANACIAL TIMES
'Harding's creepy, ingenious tale slyly wrongfoots the reader, and its
deliciously sinister conclusion is the stuff of troubled nights.' THE LADY
'Brilliantly creepy' DAILY MIRROR
'An intriguing read' GRAZIA
'A good, clever, modern take on old-style American gothic; a creepy
haunted house tale in which the living are just as eerie as any real or
imagined ghouls.' NEW ZEALAND HERALD
'a scarily good story, in an arrestingly unusual narrative voice.' THE
OXFORD TIMES John Harding was born near Ely. He is the author of the
bestselling What We Did On Our Holiday, made into an ITV drama starring
Shane Ritchie and Roger Lloyd Pack. He is a book reviewer for the Daily
Mail and lives in London.
