Kehua!

“As a study of fiction, femininity and family it is bursting with intelligence and fire”—from the award-winning author of Death of a She Devil (The Telegraph).   Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption, and remorse, takes you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North London, where, just outside the kitchen window, something startling shimmers on the very edges of perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our kehua—a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the conversation within. Scarlet—a long-legged, skinny young woman of the new world order—has announced to Beverley, her aged grandmother, that she intends to leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson Wright, he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well on her way to her ninth decade, but she’s not beyond using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble.   How the kehua became attached to a three-year-old white girl is the origin of your writer’s tale. Suffice to say that murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and that this is the story of how they learn to live with their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live with them.   “A haunting book . . . The novel is a spirited triumph: adroit, affecting and bung-full of genuine humour and ideas.” —The Guardian   “Weldon crafts this traffic between spirit worlds with characteristic wit, and without sacrificing the intricacies of a family’s struggle to accept its past.” —Financial Times   “Wonderfully wicked, highly readable.” —Independent

From Booklist

When Beverley was a young girl in New Zealand, running away from her mother’s murdered body, a flock of Maori spirits came to be her protectors. Unable to return to their home, these spirits, the Kehua, followed Beverley to England, where they remain with her still, almost 90 years later. Through three generations, the Kehua have watched over Beverley and her female descendants the only way they know how, counterintuitively urging them to run from their joys as well as their fears, and Beverley decides it is time to do something about it. Their story, though, is only one of two told here because the storyteller is visited by ghosts of her own, and she often interrupts Beverley’s story to explain herself and her method of writing. Although the writer’s presence feels increasingly intrusive, both tales are enjoyable blendings of reality and ethnic traditions and beliefs, with a little metafiction thrown in. This split-personality structure stands out in Weldon’s long line of novels, making its story of trickle-down tragedy worth a look. --Cortney Ophoff

About the Author

A novelist, playwright and essayist, Fay Weldon is best known for her novels The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Praxis, and Worst Fears. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in 1990, and was awarded a CBE from the Queen in 2001. In 2006, Weldon was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University in West London. She lives in Dorset with her husband, the poet Nick Fox.

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