Kehua!: A Ghost Story

by Fay Weldon (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $4.29

  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...

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $3.25

  A kehua is a Maori ghost - the wandering dead searching for their ancestral home. Without the proper rituals to send them on their way, kehua are forced to remain on Earth to haunt their relatives. They're not dangerous, and they even try to help the living, though it's wise not to listen to them. They tend to get things wrong...In the wake of murder and suicide, a young woman flees New Zealand, hoping to escape the past and find a new life. But the unshriven spirits of the recently departed can't rest peacefully, and are forced to emigrate with her, crossing oceans to finally settle in - of all places - Muswell Hill, London. Here their shadowy flutterings and murmured advice haunts the young woman and her female bloodline across the decades, across the generations. 'Run!' the Kehua whisper. 'Run, run, run!'