Hazardous Spirits — Anbara Salam

An Entertainment Weekly's Best Book of Fall

“Equal parts lush Gothic mystery and delicately wrought 1920s domestic drama. . . . a riveting exploration of the unknowable -- whether it's ghosts, spirits, or the people we love most.” -- Tara Isabella Burton, author of The World Cannot Give

In 1920s Edinburgh, Scotland, Evelyn Hazard is a young, middle-class housewife living the life she's always expected -- until her husband, Robert, upends everything with a startling announcement: he can communicate with the dead.


The couple is pulled into the spiritualist movement -- a religious society of mediums and psychics that emerged following the mass deaths of the Spanish flu and First World War -- and Evelyn's carefully composed world begins to unravel. And when long-held secrets from her past threaten to come to the surface, presenting her with the prospect of losing all she holds dear, Evelyn finds herself unable to avoid the question: is the man she loves a fraud, a madman, or -- most frighteningly -- is he telling the truth?


Cloaked in the moody, beguiling backdrop of twentieth-century Scotland, Anbara Salam's Hazardous Spirits brings a sparkling sense of period detail and dry humor to the life of a young woman whose world is unsettled by mediums and spirits, revealing the devastating secrets that ghosts from the past can tell when given the voice to do so.