num_pages: 480
description: An ACE for this ISBN can be found hereShortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.Hilarious and sinister, ‘Beyond Black’ is a tale of dark secrets and secret forces in suburban England. Alison Hart is a medium by trade: dead people talk to her, and she talks back. With her flat-eyed, flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, she tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital road, passing on messages from dead ancestors: 'Granny says she likes your new kitchen units.'Alison's ability to communicate with spirits is a torment rather than a gift. Behind her plump, smiling and bland public persona is a desperate woman. She knows that the next life holds terrors that she must conceal from her clients. Her days and nights are haunted by the men she knew in her childhood, the thugs and petty criminals who preyed upon her hopeless, addled mother, Emmie. They infiltrate her house, her body and her soul; the more she tries to be rid of them, the stronger and nastier they become.‘Beyond Black’ is a witty and deeply sinister story of dark secrets and forces, set in an England that jumps at its own shadow, a country whose banal self-absorption is shot through by fear of the engulfing dark.
language: English
title: Beyond Black
titlecomplete: Beyond Black
characters: Colette (Beyond Black), Alison Hart
genres: Literary Fiction, Ghosts, Novels, Supernatural, Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Contemporary, Mystery, British Literature
ratings_count: 8527
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Booker Prize
category: Longlist, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Shortlist
publisher: Harper Perennial