Grim Tales

What happens when the creator of The Railway Children turns to the dark? These seven tales reveal an unexpected facet of E. Nesbit: a writer haunted by love that survives mortality, by secrets locked in ancestral homes, by portraits whose subjects refuse to stay in their frames. The collection opens with "The Ebony Frame," in which a young man inherits his aunt's house and discovers a painting so enchanting he cannot look away - and so unsettling that he cannot look away from that either. Nesbit brings her characteristically sharp eye for domestic detail to these ghostly encounters, grounding the supernatural in Victorian parlors and country lanes. The stories share a quiet conviction: that the dead do not easily leave us, and that love - whether faithful or obsessive - bends the rules of nature. This is ghost fiction from an author better known for wonder, and it carries the strange thrill of hearing a familiar voice speak in an unfamiliar tongue.