The Dark

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Part haunting mystery, part riveting historical fiction, and wholly a literary tour-de-force, The Dark deftly ushers the reader into the shadowy border between life and death as it tells the tale of the infamous Fox Sisters: Leah, Maggie and Katie. In their heyday in New York during the mid-1800s, the controversial sisters founded the Spiritualist Movement, a pseudo-religion that attracted numerous avid followers to its seances in darkened parlours, where the grief-struck, the curious and the desperate—among them influential Quakers, prominent New Yorkers and powerful politicians—sought to communicate with the dead. These followers launched the humble-born sisters into a glittering new world of celebrity, with its attendant wealth and romantic entanglements as well as unwelcome scrutiny and scandal. Although they were dogged by controversy, subjected to ever-more-intrusive questioning, and grew susceptible to drink and dissolution, the sisters stoically maintained that they were not frauds, and that the dead could truly speak—that is, until a final unforgiveable transgression by one sister tore their bonds apart.

Now, in 1893, only the middle sister, Maggie—penniless, ill and forgotten—is left alive. A mysterious caregiver named Mrs. Mellon is her one lifeline to the world. Although Mrs. Mellon clearly prides herself on her pragmatism and skepticism, she cannot resist prompting the wry, black-witted Maggie into revealing her family’s darkest secrets. But is Mrs. Mellon—a woman with a few murky secrets of her own—Maggie’s confessor, her saviour, her interrogator or the last person upon whom a Fox sister is working her finely honed art?

Claire Mulligan’s first novel, The Reckoning of Boston Jim, was nominated for the 2007 Giller Prize and the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction. Claire was born and raised in British Columbia and graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1995. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.