Kate Summerscale

London, 1938. Alma Fielding, an ordinary young woman, begins to experience supernatural events in her suburban home. Nandor Fodor - a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical research - begins to investigate. In doing so he discovers a different and darker type of haunting: trauma, alienation, loss - and the foreshadowing of a nation's worst fears. As the spectre of Fascism lengthens over Europe, and as Fodor's obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed.

With rigour, daring and insight, the award-winning pioneer of historical narrative non-fiction Kate Summerscale shadows Fodor's enquiry, delving into long-hidden archives to find the human story behind a very modern haunting.

When the married Isabella Robinson was introduced to the dashing Edward Lane at a party in 1850, she was utterly enchanted. He was 'fascinating', she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man's charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, and she was to find it hard to shake...

In one of the most notorious divorce cases of the nineteenth century, Isabella Robinson's scandalous secrets were exposed to the world. Kate Summerscale brings vividly to life a frustrated Victorian wife's longing for passion and learning, companionship and love, in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality.

A story of romance and fidelity, insanity, fantasy and the boundaries of privacy in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality, 'Mrs Robinson's Disgrace' brings vividly to life a complex, frustrated Victorian wife.

British eccentric Marion ‘’Joe’’ Carstairs was a worldclass speedboat racer, a rich heiress and a lesbian. 1930’s society frowned upon her lifestyle so she bought Whale Cay, an island off the coast of Florida, and ran it as her own private kingdom.

On a summer's morning in 1860, the Kent family awakes in their elegant Wiltshire home to a terrible discovery; their youngest son has been brutally murdered. When celebrated detective Jack Whicher is summoned from Scotland Yard he faces the unenviable task of identifying the killer - when the grieving family are the suspects.

The original Victorian whodunnit, the murder and its investigation provoked national hysteria at the thought of what might be festering behind the locked doors of respectable homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing. 

In 1895, the decomposing body of Emily Coombes was found in her London home. There was no mystery about how she died because her fourteen-year-old son Robert quickly confessed. But this is not just an examination of a shocking Victorian case, it is also a compelling account of its aftermath, and of man's capacity to overcome the past.