Kehua!

Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua - a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within.



Scarlet - a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order - has announced to Beverley - her aged grandmother - that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright - he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but she's not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble.



And neither are the kehua outside the window.



The sins and traumas of the past haunt us all. Call them hungry ghosts, grateful dead, dybbuks, kelpies, poltergeists, furies or kehua, we carry them with us - across continents, oceans, decades and generations. Quite how they became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writer's tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them...



Fay Weldon was brought up in New Zealand. Writer of the first ever episode of Upstairs, Downstairs and current Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, Fay is best known for her novels Praxis, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Worst Fears. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE. She lives on a hilltop in Dorset with her husband.



Wickedly stylish... bursting with intelligence and fire



As light as a good souffle... packed with intelligent observations about manners and morals... a rich treat



Weldon has form when it comes to she-devilry and she knows exactly how to entrance the reader



Marshalling those elegant, deadly, sentences - there's simply no touching Weldon as a writer



Weldon crafts beautiful characters and creates wonderful stories and Kehua! is an exceptional novel - even for her.



Warmly exuberant metafiction... A warm-hearted, laugh-aloud book



A melange of waspish satire and briskly drawn characters... Weldon can't write a boring sentence



Immensely sophisticated