Laura Purcell is the author of The Silent Companions, The Poison Thread, and The House of Whispers. She worked in local government, the financial industry and a bookshop before becoming a full-time writer. She lives in Colchester, the oldest recorded town in England, with her husband and pet guinea pigs. Fascinated by the darker side of royal history, Purcell has also written two historical fiction novels about the Hanoverian dynasty.
Her latest novel is The Shape of Darkness.
At the Guardian, Purcell tagged her top ten books about spirit mediums, including:
Beyond Black by Hilary MantelRead about the other entries on the list.
No one writes about the dead better than Mantel. She breathed new life into the bones of Thomas Cromwell and the Wolf Hall Trilogy was full of gothic touches, but this earlier work is on another level. It tells the tale of spirit medium Alison and her toxic relationship with her manager, Collette, who inhabit a drab, threadbare life very like a ghost land in itself. They jazz up the concept of life after death to make it more palatable for their audience, however, the real fiends haunting Alison are obscene and bleakly horrific.
Beyond Black is among Jess Kidd's ten essential supernatural mysteries and Sarah Porter's five top books with unusual demons and devils.
--Marshal Zeringue