Springtime: A Ghost Story

All the traditional pleasures of a ghost story are revived, and cleverly transformed, in de Kretser’s taut, nimble, atmospheric short novel. It isn’t spirits but personal habits and histories that intrude on the verdant and “explosive Sydney spring,” the first Frances and Charlie are spending as a couple. Frances, 28, is an art historian “whose life had taken place in books”; she met older IT guy Charlie in Melbourne a year prior, and the two bonded over their French mothers and complicated childhoods. Charlie left his family to be with Frances, but the past shadows their new life together. Frances, who doesn’t want children, finds Charlie’s visiting young son Luke to be an inscrutable intruder; she resents Luke’s harassment of her dog, Rod; studying Luke’s mother’s photos online, she thinks “her face had the empty yet powerful look of a primitive mask.” To make matters worse, an eerie prank caller targets the couple, and at a dinner party, Charlie’s attention seems to wander to a coworker. When Frances notices, on her daily walks with Rod, a mysterious figure in the “shadowy depths” of a garden, she wonders whether she’s seeing something otherworldly. Readers will retain the precise, startling images powering de Kretser’s prose—azaleas growing “as big as fists”—rendering even loved ones as unknowable as the world beyond. (Apr.)