The Thirteen Travellers

Hugh Walpole wrote The Thirteen Travellers in the anxious aftermath of the Great War, when England had not yet recovered its certainties. This collection bundles stories that drift between the parlor and the cemetery, between drawing-room conversation and something darker stirring in the English countryside. The characters populating these tales have all been touched by the war's strange alchemy, their social positions destabilized, their grip on reality loosened. Absalom Jay, once a fixture of London society, now moves through a world that has become fundamentally alien to him. Meanwhile, Lizzie Rand stands as Walpole's most accomplished supernatural excursion, a ghost story that refuses easy comfort. These stories share a central preoccupation: what remains when the structures we trusted have crumbled? The English manor house, once a symbol of permanence, now feels haunted by both literal and metaphorical ghosts. For readers who appreciate M.R. James or the postwar unease of British fiction, this collection offers thirteen small descents into dread.