Arrivals: The Beautiful Child

   

    A ghost story based on a tale by Henry James, Emma Tennant's The Beautiful Child is "part detective story, part analysis of a writer's urge to place real people within fiction .... a Christmas fireside tale that examines the horrors of The Turn of the Screw while revealing those of today".

    

    James's story is about a couple who beseech a fashionable artist to paint the child they never had, and Emma Tennant fills out that unfinished piece and "ends on a note of terror that would have been appreciated by the master himself ..." In doing so she covers the scandal behind James's inability to proceed with the story which he abandoned in 1902, and sets an English professor to solve the mystery of the hauntings at James's home, Lamb House in Rye.

    Intrigued? I am.