The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave

Description

Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This edition of Henry James's classic ghost stories features an afterword by bestselling author Kate Mosse OBE. A young governess is employed to look after two orphaned siblings in a grand country house. Isolated and inexperienced, she is at first charmed by the children - but gradually suspects that they may not be as innocent as they seem. She soon begins to see sinister figures at the window, but do they exist solely in her imagination, or are they ghosts intent on a terrible and devastating task? The Turn of the Screw is one of the most famous and eerily equivocal ghost stories ever written. Owen Wingrave is the story of a son in a long line of military heroes who refuses to follow tradition, yet proves his bravery in a haunted room.

Henry James was born in New York in 1843 and was educated in Europe and America. He left Harvard Law School in 1863, after a year's attendance, to concentrate on writing, and from 1869 he began to make prolonged visits to Europe, eventually settling in England in 1876. His literary output was prodigious and of the highest quality: more than ten outstanding novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The American; countless novellas and short stories; as well as innumerable essays, letters, and other pieces of critical prose. Known by contemporary fellow novelists as 'The Master', James died in London in 1916.

There are phrases and scenes in the book written with such skill and care and trickery as to make any reader follow it with a great unease . . . It is a very frightening story. * Colm Toibin, The Guardian * In this age of anxiety, in which a child may be in her room and yet, through a laptop, can be anywhere in the world, The Turn of the Screw is particularly resonant - every parent's battle to protect their children from unnamed malevolence. * Gillian Flynn, New York Times Book Review *