The Walworth Beauty

Michele Roberts Bloomsbury €23.79

London’s seamy, irrepressible history is the star of an atmospheric ghost story that begins when Madeleine is booted from her job as an English Lit lecturer. Single and 60, she decides to shake things up further by trading her smart City studio for a south-of-the-river garden flat. But the presence she feels stirring in the air there isn’t as genial as her bucolic-sounding new address, Apricot Place. Gradually, her story becomes entwined with a second narrative strand, set in 1851, centring on a man interviewing prostitutes. A slow beginning gives way to an intoxicating blend of the fanciful and the gritty.