Angelica

Angelica

Author: Arthur Phillips
Desc: From the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague comes an even more accomplished and entirely surprising new novel. Angelica is a spellbinding Victorian ghost story an intriguing literary and psychological puzzle and a meditation on marriage childhood memory and fear. The novel opens in London in the 1880s with the Barton household on the brink of collapse. Mother father and daughter provoke one another consciously and unconsciously and a horrifying crisis is triggered. As the family's tragedy is told several times from different perspectives events are recast and sympathies shift. In the dark of night a chilling sexual spectre is making its way through the house hovering over the sleeping girl and terrorizing her fragile mother. Are these visions real or is there something more sinister and more human to fear? A spiritualist is summoned to cleanse the place of its terrors but with her arrival the complexities of motive and desire only multiply. The mother's failing health and the father's many secrets fuel the growing conflicts while the daughter flirts dangerously with truth and fantasy. While Angelica is reminiscent of such classic horror tales as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House it is also a thoroughly modern exploration of identity reality and love. Set at the dawn of psychoanalysis and the peak of spiritualism's acceptance Angelica is also an evocative historical novel that explores the timeless human hunger for certainty. BONUS: This edition contains excerpts from Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur The Song Is You Prague and The Egyptologist.