The Ghost of Thomas Kempe

First published in 1973, this children's novel follows James Harrison after his family moves into an old cottage in an Oxfordshire village. A seventeenth-century sorcerer, Thomas Kempe, begins to leave notes and smash crockery, taking James for an apprentice and alarming neighbours who blame the boy. James and his friend Simon search local memory and the house itself for a way to lay the ghost, while an elderly resident remembers earlier hauntings. The tone mixes domestic comedy with fright. The book is a ghost story of a newcomer and a stubborn dead magician, not a historical novel of the Civil War.

Bound in black buckram, cover blocked with a blue and white design by Pam Smy. Black slipcase.