Angelica

A Novel

Hardcover, 331 pages

English language

Published April 3, 2007 by Random House.

View on OpenLibrary

3 stars (4 reviews)

From the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague comes an even more accomplished and entirely surprising new novel. Angelica is a spellbinding Victorian ghost story, an intriguing literary and psychological puzzle, and a meditation on marriage, childhood, memory, and fear.The novel opens in London, in the 1880s, with the Barton household on the brink of collapse. Mother, father, and daughter provoke one another, consciously and unconsciously, and a horrifying crisis is triggered. As the family's tragedy is told several times from different perspectives, events are recast and sympathies shift. In the dark of night, a chilling sexual spectre is making its way through the house, hovering over the sleeping girl and terrorizing her fragile mother. Are these visions real, or is there something more sinister, and more human, to fear? A spiritualist is summoned to cleanse the place of its terrors, but with her arrival the complexities of motive …

4 editions

Review of 'Angelica' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Wow. I heard about this book through Border's website. They had a shortlist of 5 books recommended by [a:Stephen King|3389|Stephen King|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1241573033p2/3389.jpg] (one of my favorite authors). The first book of his 5 was Angelica. I've never read any of [a:Arthur Phillips|16223|Arthur Phillips|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1231453418p2/16223.jpg] books before, but the description made it sound interesting. So I picked it up.

How to review without spoiling it...Not your every day ghost story. In fact, maybe not a ghost story at all. The book sets itself up nicely to have you guessing and second-guessing at every turn. The "unreliable" narrator is smartly used among the four main characters (each character gets his/her own section) to pull the wool over the readers' eyes and make you think (and rethink) your opinions of the plot and the characters themselves.

Basically, after nearly dying several times to produce a child for her husband, Constance Barton finally gives birth to …

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Subjects

  • American Novel And Short Story
  • Fiction
  • Fiction - Horror
  • Ghost
  • Fiction / General
  • General
  • Psychological
  • Mystery fiction
  • Psychological fiction
  • Spiritualism