As its title, A Jealous Ghost, indicates, haunting is the subject of this tense, terse novel. Only a few of us are convinced that we have been haunted by ghosts of the dead. But all of us are constantly haunted by lost loves, cruelties either inflicted or endured, and resigned or still restless yearnings for what we know can never be.

A N Wilson’s protagonist, Sally, a young American through whose disturbed sensibility the novel’s whole story is related, is haunted in both these ways. On the one hand, she persuades herself that the baleful ghost of the dead wife of the man with whom, on sight, she has fallen in