The opening pages introduce us to a world straight out of gothic fable. In an isolated manor house by a forbiddingly dark forest, a strange-looking baby is born. This unearthly child, Lajos, is fated to carry forward the family name of the Lazars, a noble dynasty with an alarming tendency to go mad, die violently, or both.
Set in a version of Cape Town in the years after the First World War, this sure-handed, gothic-tinged novel tells the story of Soraya, a young Muslim woman who works as a live-in housekeeper for an elderly English widow. Soraya has "a fanciful mind" and is able to see ghosts and communicate with spirits, including previous domestic workers. Much of her time is spent preparing the house, "a strange place full of fright,"
Daphne du Maurier wrote 17 novels, a few plays, and numerous short stories, but she's known chiefly for the narrative of the unnamed second Mrs. de Winter, a woman so overshadowed by her husband's late first wife that her own story is titled after her predecessor. True, some are aware that two of du Maurier's short stories, "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now," were adapted as great films by Alfred Hitchcock and Nicolas Roeg, respectively.