Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • The Sunday Times • The New Statesman • The Times • The Spectator • The Telegraph Shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection “Prepare not to see much broad daylight, literal or metaphorical, for days if you read this.... The atmosphere evoked is something I will never forget.”— The Times (London) London, 1938. In the suburbs of the city, a young housewife has become the eye in a storm of chaos. In Alma Fielding’s modest home, china flies off the shelves and eggs fly through the air; stolen jewelry appears on her fingers, white mice crawl out of her handbag, beetles appear from under her gloves; in the middle of a car journey, a turtle materializes on her lap. The culprit is incorporeal. As Alma cannot call the police, she calls the papers instead. After the sensational story headlines the news, Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research, arrives to investigate the poltergeist. But when he embarks on his scrupulous investigation, he discovers that the case is even stranger than it seems. By unravelling Alma’s peculiar history, Fodor finds a different and darker type of haunting, a tale of trauma, alienation, loss and revenge. He comes to believe that Alma’s past has bled into her present, her mind into her body. There are no words for processing her experience, so it comes to possess her. As the threat of a world war looms, and as Fodor’s obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed. With characteristic rigor and insight, Kate Summerscale brilliantly captures the rich atmosphere of a haunting that transforms into a very modern battle between the supernatural and the subconscious. “About women and power, about anxiety of the unknown and the fear of looming war, about the choices people make (consciously or unconsciously) in order to escape certain aspects of their lives . . . Summerscale's writing is so inviting, the historical details folded into the narrative so well, that The Haunting of Alma Fielding reads like a novel you don't want to put down.” —Ilana Masad, NPR “Summerscale, always a deft and humane storyteller, brings this deeply uncomfortable story to life with characteristic élan; the focus of one’s outrage and sympathy shifts from chapter to chapter, and the evocation of a (barely) between-the-wars Britain is vivid.” —Sadie Stein, The New York Times Book Review “Delightful period piece . . . always prescient about the social status of the women she studies, Summerscale notes that Alma was the very model of a colorless, faceless, powerless housewife. But a housewife with psychic powers could escape those social constraints.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review   “Kate Summerscale’s book plunges readers into this febrile atmosphere of uncertainty that deepened as a new world war clouded the horizon. It was an electric time—quite literally— which can be seen in some ways to presage our own jittery epoch. Indeed, Summerscale has a communicative fascination for moments of societal flux.” — Tobias Grey, Airmail “[A] wonderful book about the world of mediums, it deals, very soberly, with a subject that's often treated in a very trivial way. If I could have created a non-fiction companion for my novel Beyond Black , that would be the book.”— Hilary Mantel, BBC Radio 4   “Nobody is better at unpicking stories of ghosts and murders than Kate Summerscale, and this book is one of her best. Set in the unsettling world of the spiritualism-obsessed late 1930s, it is the story of Alma Fielding, a south London woman who claimed to be attacked by her own flying furniture. Was she deluded? A fraud? Or was there really a poltergeist at work? Summerscale has enormous fun finding out, and her oddly haunting story will stay with you for weeks.” —Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times   “A terrific true ghost story . . . her best book since The Suspicions of Mr Whiche r . . . She has achieved the perfect balance between her central story and its cultural context.” — Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian “Prepare not to see much broad daylight, literal or metaphorical, for days if you read this . . . the atmosphere evoked is something I will never forget.” — Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Times “Every new book by Kate Summerscale is a cause for celebration, but The Haunting of Alma Fielding is her best since The Suspicions of Mr Whicher . . . as always, she is a calm and riveting guide to traumatic historical events.” —Ruth Scurr, Spectator “Interwar Britain's mania for the occult underpins Kate Summerscale’s The Haunting of Alma Fielding , about a woman in suburban Thornton Heath who claimed to be surrounded by poltergeists. The whole thing was an elaborate fraud, but what made it unusual (in an era when the dodgy medium was the most ubiquito