Wesley Stace

On Christmas Eve, a party of friends descends on a purportedly haunted country retreat, charged with the task of discovering evidence of the supernatural. Sequestered in their rooms for the holiday, the friends reconvene on Twelfth Night at a great feast and share their stories of spectral encounter. Conducted by Charles Dickens and counting Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins among its contributors, The Haunted House examines quintessentially Victorian themes-sex and longing, nostalgia and loss-in ways that continue to resonate today. Ingeniously conceived and written, and spiked with flashes of Dickensian humor, this volume is a strange and sheer delight.

Lord Loveall, heretofore heirless lord of the sprawling Love Hall, is the richest man in England. He arrives home one morning with a most unusual package - a baby that he presents as the inheritor to the family name and fortune. In honour of his beloved sister, who died young, Loveall names the baby Rose. The household, relieved at the continuation of the Loveall line, ignores the fact that this Rose has a thorn…that she is, in fact, a boy. Rose grows up with the two servant children who are her only friends. Rose grows up blissfully unaware of her own gender, casually hitting boundaries at Love Hall's yearly cricket game and learning to shave even as she continues to wear more and more elaborate dresses. Until, of course, the fateful day when Rose's world comes crashing down around her, and she is banished from Love Hall as an impostor by those who would claim her place as heir.

Wesley StaceWrite a ReviewOne of the most auspicious debuts of recent years, Wesley Stace's Misfortune follows the rise, fall, and triumphant return of Rose Old, a foundling rescued from a London garbage heap in 1820 by the richest man in Britain. Lord Geoffroy Loveall, whose character has been shaped by perpetual mourning for a sister who died in childhood, seizes on the infant as a replacement for his beloved sister. With the help of trusted servants, he arranges for the child to be lovingly brought up at his ancestral mansion, Loveall Hall--to all appearances, his biological daughter and unhoped-for heir. No matter that the baby is not a girl. The story thus far is so engaging, and the details of Rose's childhood so playfully rendered (when she was first brought to Loveall Hall, the staff of 250 included a servant whose sole responsibility was to iron newspapers before their second reading), that it is with reluctance that the reader meets the inevitable rude, scheming relatives whose plotting will lead to the "misfortune" of the title. Luckily, Stace (the given name of the musician John Wesley Harding) takes too much delight in Rose to dump her back on the garbage heap, or at least not for long. The cross-dressing love child of Great Expectations and A. S. Byatt's Possession, Misfortune will find you breathlessly tracking the movements of its principal players, and applauding the most ridiculous twists of fate.

Una comedia dickensiana suntuosa y extravagante sobre un niño que crece como una niña en el hogar más acaudalado de la Inglaterra decimonónica. Una tarde fatídica, Lord Geoffroy Loveall llega a casa con un paquete bien poco corriente: un bebe abandonado, al que adopta y llama Rose en honor de su hermana fallecida. La mansion de Love Hall es una fuente interminable de privilegios y placeres. Solo hay un problema: lord Geoffroy deseaba una hija, pero ha adoptado un hijo. La adolescencia desvela la verdad sobre lady Rose que debe recorrer medio mundo para encontrar su verdadera identidad y reclamar el lugar que le corresponde.

En la ilustre historia de la compañía teatral Fisher hay dos Georges. Uno es un peculiar pero encantador muchacho de once años, criado en el sórdido mundo de los internados y los escenarios de los años setenta y que es enviado por primera vez al colegio; el otro, un parlanchin muñeco de ventrilocuo que perteneciera al abuelo del primer George, uno de los numeros itinerantes favoritos entre las tropas britanicas durante la segunda guerra mundial. Los dos Georges no saben nada uno del otro, hasta que los acontecimientos se confabulan para unirlos en una investigacion con vistas a descubrir los mas profundos secretos de la familia. Entrelazando la historia del chico y las "memorias" del muñeco, By George nos desvela la fascinante familia de los Fisher: una familia de hombres debiles, mujeres dominantes y niños contrariados, y con secretos asombrosos y dramaticos. A un tiempo mordazmente divertida y exquisitamente tierna, la novela de Stace constituye el inolvidable viaje de dos muchachos separados por los años pero guiados por los mismos deseos: el de encontrar una voz y el de ser amados.