Hazardous Spirits: Shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland’s National Book Awards

About this book

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Edinburgh, 1923. Evelyn Hazard lives a life shaped by comfort and routine, her days steady and predictable. That balance fractures when her husband Robert makes a quiet, astonishing claim: he can speak with the dead.

Drawn into the spiritualist circles that have taken hold in the aftermath of war and pandemic, the couple move through a city marked by grief and longing. For Evelyn, the new world opening around them brings unease rather than consolation. As séances and whispered testimonies multiply, memories she has kept carefully buried begin to stir.

The question at the centre of her marriage becomes impossible to avoid. Is Robert deceiving others, deceiving himself, or touching something that should remain hidden. Each possibility carries its own danger.

This is historical, gothic literary fiction attentive to belief and doubt, set in an Edinburgh alive with uncertainty, where the past presses close and truth is never safely contained.