The Haunting of Lamb House

"Joan Aiken's invention seemed inexhaustible ... her sheer storytelling zest a phenomenon. She was a literary treasure."
- Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials

Lamb House in Rye is said to have been haunted for centuries. This ghost story was inspired by two of its famous literary tenants - Henry James and E.F. Benson, using the imagined diary of an earlier Mayor of Rye, Toby Lamb, whose father built the handsome Georgian house.


"Lamb House is in Rye, an ancient town of East Sussex, England. It is very much a real place, even a famous one, yet The Haunting of Lamb House is as elusive to review as it must have been to write. It is safe to say that no one but Joan Aiken could have written it, not only because she was born in Rye and has the town in her bones as it were, but also because she has the power - shown in her other books - of evoking strange, often eerie events of the past and making other times, places and people vividly alive. This book goes further: She has taken the real history of Lamb House and interwoven happenings that are purely imaginary, working so skillfully that even those who have lived there can hardly tell which is which!"

So wrote novelist Rumer Godden, who also lived in Lamb House. She went on:

"For those who do not sense such things, The Haunting of Lamb House is a most skillful and intriguing interweaving of fact and fiction; to those who do, it is a memorable evocation. In either case it is a little masterpiece."