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Ghostheart | 
| Author: R.j. Ellory
Publisher: Orion
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £5.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 29423
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 0752864092
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780752864099
ASIN: 0752864092
Publication Date: January 17, 2005
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Compelling, addictive and beautifully written November 25, 2008
I took this novel on holiday and ended up walking around the apartment with it, bumping into furniture. I put it down to sleep and to eat, and that's about it. I became horribly unsociable until I'd finished it. I then couldn't, in a home full of books, find one other I wanted to read. Because although I'd closed Ghostheart, the story and the characters hadn't left me.
Roger Ellory's talent in creating real humans, with all their loves, fears, complexities, cruelties and dark corners, is one of the joys of reading his work. I don't know who I'm going to meet next, and I start each one of his novels curious to get to know new people. I may loathe them, they may make me shudder, or I may even, as with this one, fall in love with them. I always remember them. Jack Sullivan, Annie's irascible, booze-soaked but golden-hearted neighbour who adores her, is a wonderful creation.
I found the character of Annie quite entrancing, I could identify with her loneliness and her searching, and I wanted her to find who she was looking for. Will it be the seductive but elusive David Quinn?
There are some teeth-rattling horrors in Ghostheart, which haven't left me either, starting at Auschwitz and moving forward into the brutal gangland world of America in the 50s and 60s. All of it has the raw stench of authenticity which made it both difficult, and compulsive, to read. I had to know what happened.
It all works beautifully together, and I loved it.
Memorable Manhattan mystery September 2, 2008
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
Along with many others I have been investing in R J Ellory's back-catalogue in response to his hugely successful fifth novel A Quiet Belief in Angels. Ghostheart is his second novel, and again it is clear that he has a broad and diverse talent, because he has the unusual ability to tell a tale in a different style to all of his others whilst retaining his own indelible signature and personal identity. And this is such an intelligently written story that I felt tempted to read it all over again as soon as I had finished.
Essentially there are three men in the life of central character Annie O'Neill: her friend and neighbour Jack, her new lover David, and her late father Frank O'Neill. And although a huge amount of time is allocated to the two living characters, it gradually emerges that it is her father who is the most influential and who, indirectly, this book is all about despite his having died more than twenty years earlier, when Annie was about seven years old. It's a book about writing; Annie runs a small bookshop in a little lane off West 107th Street, Manhattan, and part of the inventory includes antique and classical publications that are dear to her heart. Despite this being the early part of the 21st century, Annie feels - as one suspects the author does, too - that she doesn't belong in the modern era in a literary sense, feeling a closer connection to the likes of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Hemingway than writers of the current time. An elderly man visits her shop with a tale of his own to tell, one which involves gangsters of a bygone generation and a tale that is narrated in occasional pieces within the main body of the story. Soon after Annie starts reading the letters given to her each week by the elderly man, she meets David and is quickly swept off her feet by him and enters into a passionate and blissful love affair. Meanwhile, she shares her rapidly changing life with her trusted friend and neighbour Jack Sullivan, a heavy-drinking Vietnam veteran and journalist nearly twice her age.
Through the eyes, mind and heart of a woman with little in the way of previous experience in matters of love and commitment, and who knows a lot less about her late father than she would like, the reader is taken on an odyssey of emotional traumas that encompass both the present and the past, with issues such as love, honesty, trust, heritage and revenge just some of the tests of spirit and resolve that Annie has to endure. Key among these is the drama of discovering that the past life she thought she knew is shockingly different in reality, and that she has been deceived by those closest to her for her entire life until now.
The realisation of the truth is told in minute detail, a revelation that covers almost the entire length of the novel, and while the reader might second-guess the outcome, or some elements of it, before Annie does, the conclusion is moving and narrated with great skill and sensitivity. This is a story that I will remember long after closing the final page, a tale expertly and convincingly told despite the preconceived objections some have apparently had, that a British writer should tell a story entirely based in America, and a man writing through the emotions of a woman. The open-minded will soon realise, as they most likely had done previously with other Ellory novels, that this is a storyteller of exceptional talent and diversity, and also that he is no one-hit-wonder by any means. A Quiet Belief in Angels may have been the one that everybody has heard about and read, but the truth is that everything that went before - including Ghostheart - is every bit as good.
Across 107th Street August 31, 2008
8 out of 13 found this review helpful
Along with many others I have been investing in R J Ellory's back-catalogue in response to his hugely successful fifth novel A Quiet Belief in Angels. Ghostheart is his second novel, and again it is clear that he has a broad and diverse talent, because he has the unusual ability to tell a tale in a different style to all of his others whilst retaining his own indelible signature and personal identity. And this is such an intelligently written story that I felt tempted to read it all over again as soon as I had finished.
Essentially there are three men in the life of central character Annie O'Neill: her friend and neighbour Jack, her new lover David, and her late father Frank O'Neill. And although a huge amount of time is allocated to the two living characters, it gradually emerges that it is her father who is the most influential and who, indirectly, this book is all about despite his having died more than twenty years earlier, when Annie was about seven years old. It's a book about writing; Annie runs a small bookshop in a little lane off West 107th Street, Manhattan, and part of the inventory includes antique and classical publications that are dear to her heart. Despite this being the early part of the 21st century, Annie feels - as one suspects the author does, too - that she doesn't belong in the modern era in a literary sense, feeling a closer connection to the likes of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Hemingway than writers of the current time. An elderly man visits her shop with a tale of his own to tell, one which involves gangsters of a bygone generation and a tale that is narrated in occasional pieces within the main body of the story. Soon after Annie starts reading the letters given to her each week by the elderly man, she meets David and is quickly swept off her feet by him and enters into a passionate and blissful love affair. Meanwhile, she shares her rapidly changing life with her trusted friend and neighbour Jack Sullivan, a heavy-drinking Vietnam veteran and journalist nearly twice her age.
Through the eyes, mind and heart of a woman with little in the way of previous experience in matters of love and commitment, and who knows a lot less about her late father than she would like, the reader is taken on an odyssey of emotional traumas that encompass both the present and the past, with issues such as love, honesty, trust, heritage and revenge just some of the tests of spirit and resolve that Annie has to endure. Key among these is the drama of discovering that the past life she thought she knew is shockingly different in reality, and that she has been deceived by those closest to her for her entire life until now.
The realisation of the truth is told in minute detail, a revelation that covers almost the entire length of the novel, and while the reader might second-guess the outcome, or some elements of it, before Annie does, the conclusion is moving and narrated with great skill and sensitivity. This is a story that I will remember long after closing the final page, a tale expertly and convincingly told despite the preconceived objections some have apparently had, that a British writer should tell a story entirely based in America, and a man writing through the emotions of a woman. The open-minded will soon realise, as they most likely had done previously with other Ellory novels, that this is a storyteller of exceptional talent and diversity, and also that he is no one-hit-wonder by any means. A Quiet Belief in Angels may have been the one that everybody has heard about and read, but the truth is that everything that went before - including Ghostheart - is every bit as good.
 Good editor needed! August 26, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Was expecting something amazing from this much-praised author but while the story did eventually grab me, I felt the book could use a good editor. There are a few inconsistencies which distract from the flow of the story and several almost cringingly long-winded passages describing what is going on in Annie's head. Most of the book is well written which only makes the bad bits seem especially jarring.
A tale of human longing and cruelty June 12, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book and has literally so many ingredients (love, betrayal, stark violence, gangsterism, nazi death camps) you would be hard put to fit the story into a genre ; crime? historical saga? love story? One thing is sure, you cannot put it down. This is what the more learned amongst us call "Serious Popular Fiction", I suppose. I read about 52 books a year. My means of evaluating a books' worth is simple : I ask myself "Was it good?". Well, this one was excellent. As a fan of "serious" fiction, I am aware that "crime" fiction is often seen as the poor cousin of literature. Forget that snobbery, this is a brilliantly told story. It is moving, shocking, funny, sad and, above all, rivetting. I fell in love with Annie O'Neill (note to self : hide these comments from wife). I feel lucky. I've just bought all his books and this was my first one to read. I've still got four to go. Yoohoo!!!
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