London, 1938. Nandor Fodor - a Jewish Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the Institute of Psychical Research - reads of the case of thirty-four-year-old Alma Fielding, a housewife in South London plagued by a poltergeist, and hastens to the scene of the haunting.

This unassuming suburban woman has become the eye of a storm of chaos; in her modest home, china flies off the shelves, eggs fly through the air; stolen jewellery appears on her fingers, white mice crawl out of her handbag, and beetles appear from under her gloves; a terrapin materialises on her lap in the middle of a car journey.

But, as Fodor discovers when he assumes his scrupulous investigation, the case is even stranger than the sum of its parts. As the spectre of Fascism lengthens and darkens over Europe, Fodor unravels the peculiar case of Alma Fielding, and finds a different and darker type of haunting: trauma, difference, loss.

With rigour, profundity and insight, the award-winning Kate Summerscale delves into the notorious and extraordinary and unearths the vivid and the human.