Lost
(Books)

Winifred Rudge, a bemused writer struggling to get beyond the runaway success of her mass-market astrology book, travels to London to jump-start her new novel about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival, she finds that her step-cousin and old friend John Comestor has disappeared, and a ghostly presence seems to have taken over his apartment in the nineteenth-century row house once owned by Winnie's great-great-grandfather. Is it the spirit of this ancestor, who, family legend claims, was Charles Dickens' childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? Could it be the ghostly remains of Jack the Ripper? Or a phantasm derived from a more arcane and insidious origin? Gripped by inspiration and desperation alike, Winnie finds herself the unwilling audience for a drama of spectres and shades, some from her family's peculiar history and some from her own unvanquished past. In the spirit of A.S. Byatt's Possession, with dark overtones echoing A Christmas Carol, Lost presents a rich fictional world that has enraptured Gregory Maguire's eager audience.