Hazardous Spirits
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An Entertainment Weekly's Best Book of Fall
“Equal parts lush Gothic mystery and delicately wrought 1920s domestic drama. . . . a riveting exploration of the unknowable—whether it’s ghosts, spirits, or the people we love most.”—Tara Isabella Burton, author of The World Cannot Give
In 1920s Edinburgh, Scotland, Evelyn Hazard is a young, middle-class housewife living the life she’s always expected—until her husband, Robert, upends everything with a startling announcement: he can communicate with the dead.
The couple is pulled into the spiritualist movement—a religious society of mediums and psychics that emerged following the mass deaths of the Spanish flu and First World War—and Evelyn’s carefully composed world begins to unravel. And when long-held secrets from her past threaten to come to the surface, presenting her with the prospect of losing all she holds dear, Evelyn finds herself unable to avoid the question: is the man she loves a fraud, a madman, or—most frighteningly—is he telling the truth?
Cloaked in the moody, beguiling backdrop of twentieth-century Scotland, Anbara Salam’s Hazardous Spirits brings a sparkling sense of period detail and dry humor to the life of a young woman whose world is unsettled by mediums and spirits, revealing the devastating secrets that ghosts from the past can tell when given the voice to do so.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Salam's densely atmospheric latest (after Belladonna), a woman in 1923 Edinburgh grapples with her husband's newfound obsession with the spirit realm. Evelyn Hazard quietly gave up her baby for adoption a decade earlier, a secret she shared only with her sister, Dolly, before Dolly died. Now, she worries her husband, Robert, will contact Dolly's spirit and learn the truth. Evelyn trails him to the Spiritualist Library, where she's mistaken for Dolly and eventually reveals herself to Robert. She then begins accompanying him to a spiritual hall, where she's dismayed to discover Robert's "spiritual tutor" is a child named Clarence who speaks with crowds about deceased relatives. Robert picks up the skill, too, forging a traveling I-see-dead-people act with Clarence, and Evelyn comes along for the tour. Due to their travels, Evelyn's social circle widens, though she continues to wrestle with her feelings about Robert's calling to clairvoyancy: "If Robert was right, then she had only ever known half the world." When a child goes missing, people clamor for Clarence and Robert's assistance, and Evelyn questions her husband's sincerity. Though the reader might grow tired of Evelyn's continuous dread over her secret being revealed, Salam crafts a believable portrait of the 1920s spiritualism scene. Historical fiction fans will savor this.
