“I was really sad about it, because I just fell in love with the book.
She was desperate to add The Ghosts to the list but as it wasn’t quite as well known as, say, Carrie’s War or The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, she was unable to justify it.
Sara and her younger brother Georgie are seeking help before they die in a fire at the hands of the evil housekeeper Mrs Wickens and her vile husband, who have designs on the orphans’ inheritance, so Lucy and Jamie have to travel back in time to avert tragedy.Ĭoonan said, “I was familiar with Antonia Barber but had never read this before, and I just thought that it was the most magical novel, kind of a wonderful children’s version of The Turn of the Screw.”Ĭoonan heads up the Virago children’s list, which publishes classic authors such as Nina Bawden and Joan Aiken. The fact it is back in print at all is testimony not only to Gatiss reviving interest, but the tenacity of Virago editor Donna Coonan.Ĭoonan was first introduced to the novel a decade ago, and immediately fell in love with Barber’s story of siblings Lucy and Jamie who move to a dilapidated country mansion in 1918 when their mother is offered a job as housekeeper by the mysterious solicitor Mr Blunden.īut Blunden has an ulterior motive as Lucy and Jamie discover when they encounter what appear to be the ghosts of two children who lived in the house a century before.
Photograph: ViragoĪlthough The Ghosts was shortlisted for the Carnegie medal when it first came out, and was given a movie-tie in edition when the Lionel Jeffries big-screen adaptation was released in 1972, it fell out of print secondhand copies are scarce and selling for upwards of £100 online. The new edition of The Amazing Mr Blunden.
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