by J. Meade Falkner

J. Meade Falkner’s The Lost Stradivarius is one of the great supernatural novels. It tells of the possession of a nineteenth-century student by an eighteenth-century necromancer, through the agency of a Stradivarius violin hidden in an Oxford college. The novel is not only a consummate supernatural story, but one that betrays the author’s ambivalent attraction to the aesthetic and decadent movements of the 1890s.

Hugh Walpole apparently commented on Falkner in his own copy of The Lost Stradivarius (a copy previously owned by Thomas Hardy) “He was a real abnormal romantic.”

Available in hardback for the first time in many years, this new edition also offers the reader two short stories by Falkner, “A Midsummer’s Night Marriage” and “Charalampia”. These fugitive pieces have previously appeared only in periodicals, and this edition is the first to collect them into book form.

As Mark Valentine notes in his new Introduction to this volume: “The Lost Stradivarius... will engage the reader’s interest most insistently, and elicit, I have no doubt, several rereadings, whether simply for the pleasures of a classic ghost story, or for the fascination of a finely poised spiritual drama counterpointing art, ecstasy and license against duty, decorum, and rectitude.”.

“The Lost Stradivarius can justly be termed a masterpiece of supernatural literature.” – Steve Duffy, All Hallows

The Lost Stradivarius is a sewn hardback book of 233 + xvi pages. Limited to 350 copies.

Price £25.00 / $45.00 inc. p&p

Back to Home Page

 

Updated 24th June 2002.