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Filled with evocative descriptions of Cambridge, past and present, of seventeenth-century glassmaking, alchemy, the Great Plague, and Newton’s scientific innovations, Ghostwalk centers around a real historical mystery that Rebecca Stott has uncovered involving Newton’s alchemy.
A Cambridge historian, Elizabeth Vogelsang, is found drowned, clutching a
glass prism in her hand. The book she was writing about Isaac Newton’s
involvement with alchemy—the culmination of her lifelong obsession with the
seventeenth century—remains unfinished. When her son, Cameron, asks his former
lover, Lydia Brooke, to ghostwrite the missing final chapters of his mother’s
book, Lydia agrees and moves into Elizabeth’s house—a studio in an orchard where
the light moves restlessly across the walls. Soon Lydia discovers that the
shadow of violence that has fallen across present-day Cambridge, which escalates
to a series of murders, may have its origins in the troubling evidence that
Elizabeth’s research has unearthed. As Lydia becomes ensnared in a dangerous
conspiracy that reawakens ghosts of the past, the seventeenth century slowly
seeps into the twenty-first, with the city of Cambridge the bridge between them.
Filled with evocative descriptions of Cambridge, past and present, of
seventeenth-century glassmaking, alchemy, the Great Plague, and Newton’s
scientific innovations, Ghostwalk centers around a real historical
mystery that Rebecca Stott has uncovered involving Newton’s alchemy. In it, time
and relationships are entangled—the present with the seventeenth century, and
figures from the past with the love-torn twenty-first century woman who is
trying to discover their secrets. A stunningly original display of scholarship
and imagination, and a gripping story of desire and obsession, Ghostwalk
is a rare debut that will change the way most of us think about scientific
innovation, the force of history, and time itself.
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