Book description
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...
