Voices in an Empty Room

Description

Was it simply, in the coroner's words, a stupid and tragic accident? Sybil Crawfurd would never have expected her brother, Hugo, to die like that, so suddenly, in a fall from the balcony of a Brighton hotel . . . The handsome, intelligent headmistress of a girls' school on the south coast, Sybil is not alone in desperately wanting `but two hours converse with the dead'. Lavinia Trent, the well-known actress, and Bridget Nagel, whose journalist husband was killed in the Falklands, are equally ready to enter the bizarre, comic, unnerving world of paranormal experiment . . .

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011. "One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov." Beryl Bainbridge

'Gripping entertainment form start to finish' Listener 'False trail follows false trail; the curtain is tantalizingly lifted and then, again, lowered ... King is now writing at the height of his powers' Spectator 'His most masterful, comic and moving novel yet' Financial Times 'One of the most haunting and haunted novels of the year' Sunday Times