Kerfol

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About this book

A visit to an old house in Brittany begins with a friend's suggestion that the narrator might buy it. At Kerfol, tree-lined avenues lead to a moat, a chapel and a courtyard where several dogs watch the visitor without making a sound. Edith Wharton gives the buildings and their silence as much attention as the strange animals, allowing an ordinary inspection of a property to become increasingly unsettling.

The short ghost story also turns to the house's past, including the death of Yves de Cornault and the accusations brought against his wife, Anne. Conflicting testimony and uncertain evidence introduce a different kind of unease: the difficulty of knowing what happened behind thick walls. Readers interested in haunted places and stories shaped by doubt will find a compact narrative in which close observation gradually gives way to suspicion.

About the author

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones into the New York society she spent a career anatomising, and her first book was about interior decoration rather than fiction: The Decoration of Houses, written in 1897 with the architect Ogden Codman Jr.