Ghost writing

The thrill of ghostwriting

“I begin to see the outlines of a scene, so I open my computer and start revising, growing it into what I think he intended it to be. This is the job of a ghostwriter, and I’m going to do it with fidelity.” If Julie Clark is clear about anything in The Ghostwriter, her gripping fifth novel, it’s the magnetic power of narrative – particularly when filtered through layers of secrecy, memory, and artifice. Clark, a New York Times bestselling author, has a flair for sleek, psychological crime fiction and delivers a taut and addictive story that is both clever and compulsively readable.

ghostwriting

Stealing the story: A Lonely Man, by Chris Power, reviewed

From our UK edition

Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their two young daughters: two prams in the hall, two enemies of promise. Having enjoyed some success with a collection of short stories, Robert has been commissioned to write a novel; but the submission date was 18 months ago and he now spends his mornings deleting, letter by letter, the few words he produced the day before. His stories had once come easily: they grew out of his quotidian world in the form of anecdotes passed on to him by friends, family and strangers in bars. But nothing around him will feed his present fiction and he is fast fading out of his own life. ‘R U ALIVE?’ asks his agent.