Monday, September 06, 2010

What is Andrew Taylor reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Andrew Taylor, author of Bleeding Heart Square and The Anatomy of Ghosts.

His entry begins:
Kate Atkinson: Started Early, Took My Dog

Kate Atkinson’s latest novel is the fourth in her series about Jackson Brodie, the ex-soldier, ex-police officer and ex-husband who now works in a desultory way as a private investigator searching for missing children. Like its predecessors, Started Early, Took My Dog takes place in an exhilarating and occasionally infuriating version of modern Britain that reads as if designed by a theoretical physicist with a sense of humour.

The book occupies that shadowy territory between...[read on]
Both Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog and Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts, now available in the UK, will be released in early 2011 in the US.

About The Anatomy of Ghosts:
1786, Jerusalem College, Cambridge

They say Jerusalem is haunted by Mrs Whichcote's ghost. Frank Oldershaw claims he saw her in the garden, where she drowned. Now he's under the care of a physician.

Desperate to salvage her son's reputation and restore him to health, Lady Anne Oldershaw employs her own agent - John Holdsworth, author of The Anatomy of Ghosts, a controversial attack on the existence of ghostly phenomena. But his arrival in Cambridge disrupts the uneasy status quo. He glimpses a world of privilege and abuse, where the sinister Holy Ghost Club governs life at Jerusalem more effectively than the Master, Dr Carbury, ever could.

But Holdsworth's powers of reason and his knowledge of natural philosophy have other challenges. He dreams of his dead wife, Maria, who roams the borders of death. Now there's Elinor, the very-much-alive Master's wife, to haunt him in life. And at the heart of it all is the mystery of what really happened to Sylvia Whichcote in the claustrophobic confines of Jerusalem.

Why was Sylvia found lying dead in the Long Pond just before a February dawn? And how did she die? Indeed, why was she at Jerusalem, living or dead, in the first place?
View the video trailer for The Anatomy of Ghosts, and learn more about the book and author at Andrew Taylor's website.

The Page 69 Test: Bleeding Heart Square.

Writers Read: Andrew Taylor.

--Marshal Zeringue