Why Weeps The Willow

Brian Taylor

Target Age

Description

Sometimes a ghost has needs which survive beyond the grave'. Why Weeps the Willow is a haunting and erotic love story set on the North Norfolk coast in the autumn of 1917, towards the end of the First World War. It is also a ghost story, telling of a ghost compelled to wander the places she knew in life, whilst searching increasingly desperately for a means of recreating the intensely physical love she had enjoyed when alive. Rebecca Melchin is a determined teenage girl, trying to find her way through the pitfalls of her first love affair with an older man. Francis Symonds is a powerful and ruthless woman, determined to hold on to her family's estates in Norfolk at any cost, despite the death of her brother on the battlefields of First World War France. Emily Marne is the girl who may be a German spy, may be a ghost haunting the places she knew in life whilst taking over the body of any susceptible person whose will she can control as she seeks for a means of experiencing physical love again, or may only exist in the mind of Paul Kingdom, who is the link between the three of them. Paul is a soldier invalided home to Norfolk from the war in France. Back in England he was the only survivor of a zeppelin attack on an asylum, during which all records were destroyed, so nobody really knows what he had been incarcerated there for . Was it only for the amnesia from which he is still suffering, or was there a more sinister reason for him being there? Incest, espionage and murder all play their part before the answer to the question posed on a suicide's grave is revealed. Why Weeps the Willow?