Author(s): Valerie Martin

Fiction

Was it possible that the book he had before him was an original document, squirreled away for sixteen years? Or was it simply another hoax, the desperate ploy of a poor, ambitious young writer, just as he had been, who schemed, just as he had schemed, to captivate the fickle attention of the public by tying a painter to the taffrail of a famous mystery ship? A ghost ship appears in the mist. To a struggling author called Arthur Conan Doyle, it is an inspiration. To Violet Petra, the most infamous mystic of her age, it is a reminder. To the death-obsessed Victorian public, it is a preoccupation. And to one family, tied to the sea for generations, it is a tragedy. In salons and rough seas, seances and the mind of a genius, Valerie Martin looks behind the myth and brings an extraordinary story to life. Engrossing and mesmerising, intricate and endlessly intriguing, THE GHOST OF THE MARY CELESTE is an examination of love, nature and the fictions that pass as truth.