It is 1957 and Daphne Du Maurier, the famous novelist, is called to London because her husband, an eminent ex-soldier, and now an official at Buckingham Palace, has had a nervous breakdown. After arranging his care, Daphne takes solace in her research on the overlooked brother of the Brontë sisters, Branwell. Soon she is corresponding with the self-appointed curator of Branwell's, an ex-librarian called Mr Symington, and so begins an enduring, distant relationship.

The stories of Du Maurier and Symingon form two strands, and these are joined by a third, which is written (in the first person) by a young PhD student who is also taking solace in the story of the Brontës. Like Daphne and Mr Symington, she too is having marital difficulties, and like them she finds that the story of the Brontës absorbs her and allows her to escape.

Most good novels, I find, drag me in to their kingdom, and as I am reading them I feel as though I am living alongside them, sharing their air; with some I just share the story of the characters' outer lives, but with others I come to know their inner worlds too. I like this sort of novel the best. Usually it is just interesting to hear another mind at work; but sometimes it becomes more startling than this, and there were times, when I was reading Daphne, that I stopped mid-paragraph because the characters' thoughts were so similar to my own. For instance here the PhD student thinks she sees a familiar figure going down the street:

But I don't think it was actually her, I just wanted it to be her, like when my mother died, and in the months that followed, I'd see the back of her beige raincoat, rounding a corner ahead of me, or her face behind a misted window on a bus, swooping past me when crossing the road.

Yes, that's exactly it - and up until I read that I'd thought I was the only one who experienced it.

Each of the main three characters in this book are haunted by the ghosts of not only the dead but also the living and the imagined. Daphne Du Maurier is haunted by Rebecca, the heroine of her famous novel, and also 'the Snow Queen', her husband's mistress. She is also haunted, briefly but disturbingly, by 'men in trilby hats'. The PhD student (her name is only mentioned towards the end of the novel), is haunted by the first wife of her husband, the beautiful and gifted Rachel. Picardie allows this to chime satisfyingly with Jane Eyre:

He doesn't need an alarm clock, though there is a clock on the little table his side of the bed, and old wind-up one that ticks, very quietly, and sometimes I wake up in the night and hear it ticking , and wonder if it was Rachel's clock, and if it is waiting for her, marking time...

The walls of the bedroom are red - a dark red, not a colour that I'd ever choose, it's too reminiscent of the nightmarish red room that Jane Eyre was locked up in as a child...

The irascible Symington is haunted too - mainly by past treacheries and mistakes - but also, like Du Maurier and the PhD student, by Branwell Brontë. According to Picardie's Du Maurier Branwell is 'the failure of the family, haunted by his sense of that he achieved nothing in his life, by the spectre of his unwritten masterpieces, his unpublished novels, his unfinished paintings; tormented by the knowledge of unfulfilled promise, of hope turned to ashes, dust.'

This turns out to be the most damaging ghost of them all.

The three strands are skilfully woven together - each episode just as absorbing as the others. Apart from Du Maurier and the Brontës, J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan makes an appearance too. I learnt a lot and it made utterly compelling reading. There are some gorgeous passages on writing and that obsession most readers, writers and librarians share - books. The ending is unexpected and satisfying. Highly recommended.