It's taken me a long time to get around to reading The Lost Ones and I don't know why because it was brilliant. I'm not normally a fan of period fiction but this pacy gothic ghost story had me hooked from the start. A troubled, repressed woman, a creepy old house, a dead child, a pregant sister - and the spectre of WWI hanging over everything - what's not to love. The best part about the lost ones - and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler, is that the author doesn't shy away from this novel being a ghost story - the ending is spot on!

Stella Marcham is grieving for her fiancè Gerald who died in her arms after being heavily wounded during the Great War. Her grief is absolute and all consuming so her sister Madeleine is called to come and help her through it. With Madeleine’s guidance, Stella starts to feel stronger though the thought of Gerald is never far away.

When Hector, Madeleine’s husband, asks Stella to stay with his wife at his family home she jumps at the chance to be with her sister again. Taking her maid Annie with her to Greyswick, it isn’t long before unexplained things start happening and Stella begins to understand why Madeleine wants to leave but in order for that to happen, Stella needs to delve into the past and the terrible events that have led up to situation she now finds herself in.

I’m so pleased that I was granted permission to read this book as it’s creepy, eerie and downright chilling and it hooked me almost instantly. Whilst reading, it felt ‘Rebeccaesque’ in places which made me enjoy it even more and the story flowed so well that it was hard for me to put it down.

Huge thanks to HQ and NetGalley for letting me read this book in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you for the advanced copy of this book but I did not finish it - it was not one for me. My mum liked it though as she found it on my Kindle hence the 2 stars

****/5
I seem to be attracted to books where the house is a character in itself lately. This is another of those books and another that has done it well. Wonderfully atmospheric and creepy, this novel is perfect for fans of The Silent Companions and The Woman in Black. Packed with interesting and multilayered characters and rich in detail. Perfectly paced with many twists along the way to keep you intrigued. I look forward to the next offering from this author.

Imagine Sixth Sense, Downton Abbey and Agatha Christie moshed up, and you'll have a good idea of what to expect with Anita Frank's debut novel. It's a good read, especially for a first book - solid characters, good build up and avoidance of the standard tropes and cliches - but the writing was a tad bloated and could've done with a trim, the story didn't merit the page count.

Very enjoyable - a solid 4 stars.

As is so often the case with Gothic tales, this was slow and meandering. This might have worked in the past, but for many modern readers, including myself, a faster pace would have made this more effective and disturbing. There's a few red herrings sprinkled along the way and a satisfactory ending, but overall, this is okay but not great.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC without obligation.

DNF. I couldn't connect with this book at all and found it really hard to get into. I had high hopes for this, which is a shame.

This book was a nice atmospheric read with an intriguing storyline. With tones of Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA, the setting and the style of the characters was an easy and interesting read. I didn't find the book to be super scary, although it was weirdly creepy at times, and the ending was satisfactory with a few little red herrings sprinkled here and there. I had not predicted the denouement, which is always a good thing. I did feel the book was a little over-long at times, but I still enjoyed it. I would read more by this author.

I could not get past how difficult this book was to read, the unnecessary use of ridiculous words. I needed to reference a dictionary. Not my style at all unfortunately. Had to stop reading at 33%.

I loved this. Reminded me really a mix of Woman in Black. An excellent detective thriller to be read with a glass of tea on the side.

Trigger warnings: Suicide, loss of child, sexual assault, murder, rampant sexism.

My Rating: 4 Books out of 5

Highlights:
I loved the portrayal of how female fear is viewed as illogical hysteria and male fear is justified and worth investigating.
I love a good mystery book.
Additional points for being historical and ghosty. Good job.
Children are creepy, this book gets it.

This book was looming on my TBR for a while and honestly I don’t know why it languished there for so long, it's a historical mystery with ghosts - this thing had my name all over it. Nonetheless, it was there a while (sorry netgalley) and when I plucked it out of my TBR jar I knew the time had come. I was delving into the mysteries of Greyswick Manor.

Stella Marcham was a very interesting main character, a former nurse on the front lines of the First World War, wrestling with her own personal grief alongside the widespread sense of it shared throughout the book's cast of characters. A time at which life in stately homes was changing, where servants were called away to war, where jobs were appearing elsewhere that didn’t require waiting hand and foot on the well-to-do, it presented a curiously timed setting for a paranormal mystery. Visiting her sister, Stella is presented with the empty, cavernous home that is Greyswick and its odd assemblage of wealthy inhabitants and servants of various sketchiness, and a sister who swears she hears a child weeping in the night.

Hysteria as a diagnosis looms large throughout The Lost Ones. Stella’s grief at losing her fiance to the war is belittled constantly, used as an argument against the soundness of her mental state as opposed to an entirely understandable reaction to a sudden and devastating loss. Her sister Madeleine is pregnant - and thus can obviously not be trusted to know her own mind, or the truth of the world she lives in. The women of this book are subject to intense scrutiny and threats of institutionalisation when the things they feel alarm the men in their lives. They are treated as creatures of emotion, entirely without reason or logical thinking, prone to overreaction and falsehoods. It might be understandable that their claims of supernatural happenings are being doubted if there weren’t an inescapable sense that they are not being doubted because their claims are incredible, but because they are women.

The mix of WW1 setting and ghost story was a fantastic one, and one I wish I saw more of because honestly it’s very realistic. There was a well-documented rise in spiritualism after WW1, people just didn’t know what to do with all that death and trauma. SO many deaths without goodbyes, without the closure of burials, led people to seek these things without the physical traditions. If your son died in a field in France, could his spirit cross the Channel one last time to say farewell? Frank does a fantastic job of showing the sceptical hope that overcame both survivors of the front and those who never left their homes in England. Stella is traumatised, recovering from the bloody violence of the war and her own devastating loss, she hasn’t enough faith to even mouth along to the hymns in church. But when she hears the crying in the night, she struggles with the idea that she may have completely lost her mind or - more frighteningly- that she’s completely sane, and there really is a child weeping in the darkness of Greyswick.

A little bit of a slow starter for me, I chalked this down more to lockdown reading lethargy than any fault of the author, it certainly picked up in pace once the ghostly happenings kicked in. The empty house brought to mind the crumbling manor in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, and coupled with the mystery of a child’s death it certainly wasn’t lacking in that wonderful gothic atmosphere I love so much in historicals. I did find myself guessing a few of the major plot twists ahead of time, but I’m not sure if I’ve simply read enough historical ghost stories by this point to put two and two together. My guessing certainly didn’t detract away from the book itself, the characters were unique enough to avoid the cookie cutter ‘master and servant’ dynamics that historical might drift towards, and there were quite a few moments that I found myself going ‘oh that’s clever’.

Overall this was a very enjoyable book, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it despite the occasional slowing of pace.

3.5🌟
I love a creepy story and partly listening to this on audio along side reading is added to the creepyness. The narrator did a really good job of setting the ambience of the book. I haven't read a ghost story for so long so it was a refreshing story. It just took so long to really get going that I did lose a bit of interest and id worked out bits a piece along the way so the big reveal wasn't all together to shocking. However it was very well written and had some real creepy moments. If you like audiobooks give the audio version a go it's worth it

A Gothic tale that keeps you hooked from the outset. It is well written and has enough twists and turns to keep driving the plot forward. I would recommend this to any ghost story fans.

This is the first book I have read by this author, it won't be the last.

This story combines the very best for my reading tastes, Historical Fiction and the supernatural! It was a compelling ghostly tale, one that had me on the edge of my seat and reading way into the night.

A wonderfully gothic tale that you must not miss. Please write more!

The Lost Ones is not subtle in its portrayal of the ghost story. That there are supernatural forces behind the secrets and strange goings on in an old stately home is not left in doubt. But I do like a good ghost story and I’m a sucker for a ‘supernatural thriller’. I’m more than happy to completely suspend all disbelief and accept that there are supernatural forces at work and go with whatever yarn an author wants to spin, no matter how unlikely.

Anita Frank’s novel is far from a standard ghost story and the author certainly gives us plenty of storylines to enjoy – part romance, part gothic ghost tale, part War story, part whodunit. It is also very well written, descriptive and believable. But even with so much going on, unfortunately something vital was missing for me. I think the problem is that it is just not chilling or thrilling enough.

Throughout the book, scenes are descriptively very well done and provide a sense of time and location that ring true. Dialogue feels natural and believable and the story is on occasion quite moving. However, when reading this late at night, on my own, at a time when I expect to have the hairs on the back of my neck raise and when I crave that feeling of not being able to stop reading even though I desperately want to put the book down... none of this happens and the story just continues with all the thrill you might expect from a well-constructed historical novel, not a gothic supernatural tale.

The novel is like a well-designed rollercoaster with only the gentlest of gradients, or a ghost train with all the lights on: you can appreciate the time and effort that has gone into its production and you can see clearly where the thrills should be, indeed you may even get quite a lot of enjoyment from the ‘ride’ but at the end of the day, the reason why we pick up the book, the excitement that we expect, is lacking.

The Lost Ones is a well-constructed story based on all of the tropes you might expect in a ghost story but somehow it just doesn’t deliver what it promises. In effect, it is a ghost story for people who don’t like to be scared, but if that’s you, there is enough good stuff in the book you will probably find it very enjoyable.
Ultimately, I think my problem is I have read too many similar stories, slightly better done (even if not necessarily better written) and so after finishing The Lost Ones I feel a little disappointed.

Thanks so much to Joe Thomas of HQ Stories for my gifted review copy of 'The Lost Ones'!

And what a perfect day to review it on! HALLOWEEN! As the witching hour approaches, what better company to find ourselves in than this debut offering from exciting new talent, Anita Frank?
As a huge fan of Susan Hill I was supremely excited to receive this glorious harcover copy and dived straight into the tale of a woman is both haunted, and haunting.

The book is creepily scary, it is not until you are in too deep, engrossed in the story of sisters Stella and Madeleine that you realise you are trapped and cannot get out...nor do you really want to.

The creepy houses, the overwhelming sense of loss and grief as well as the social obligation to hide evidence of such feelings is stifling. Stella uses her sister's pregnancy as a distraction from the grief she feels over her fiancee's death as Madeleine becomes more and more consumed by thoughts of terror and fear stuck, as she is, in her mother in law's ancestral home, Greyswick.

Little things keep happening that lead Stella to suspect her curious maidservant, Alice, of playing pranks on them but it soon becomes apparent that there are sinister goings on lurking behind the privileged veneer of Lady Brightwell's stately home.

The love that the sisters have for each other needs to be strong enough to keep them surviving their stay at Greyswick and hold back the darkness which threatens to subdue their lives. Rarely has such menace and stalking fear been so succinctly conveyed, I completely adored this twisting, gothic tale which plays with notions of grief, love and recovery as well as mental health at a time when such things were not talked about. At a period when death stalked our very nation, before the First World War ended, the sense of numbness to the overwhelming horror of the wholesale slaughter of young men across Europe is reflected in Stella's narrative and this is the perfect tale to read as the days grow shorter, and the nights get longer.

Welcome to Greyswick, built on secrets,maintained by lies and inhabited by ghostly appearances.

Will there be a happy ending?

Read 'The Lost Ones' and find out for yourself...

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this review copy. My opinions are my own. I absolutely loved this gothic ghost story set after WW1. The main character, Stella, suffering from depression following the dead of her fiancé, is adrift in a world that cannot understand why she still grieves. Going to Greyswick to be with her pregnant sister, Stella soon realises not everything is what it seems and the house has terrible secrets that are unwilling to lie dormant any longer.

When Stella returns from the war she finds her pregnant sister in trouble. Locked away in her in-laws old family house she is experiencing paranormal events – can Stella convince others her sister is telling the truth?

The Lost Ones is a historical gothic horror, set in 1917 just after the very real horrors of the first World War. I enjoyed Stella’s character – an ex-nurse who has seen her husband die on the front lines. Her weaknesses combined with the attitudes of the time give a good spin and interesting take on the horror genre. Not only is Stella trying to convince those around her that she has seen paranormal events but her status as a ‘hysterical woman’ makes it even harder for her to be believed. I also really enjoyed the language and the atmosphere of the piece, it felt realistic and claustrophobic.

However, there were some parts I didn’t find as convincing. The whole book is quite long and it felt very drawn out in places with very little happening. The whole book really didn’t have that much going on – you could easily summarise it in a few sentences. There weren’t many proper twists and turns to keep me hooked and the horror itself was very tame. There was a bit of crying in the night, some moving toy soldiers and a light went out – it wasn’t ‘keep you up all night’ horror! What did happen was also pretty predictable which didn’t help. I think with a good 150 pages taken out of it, The Lost Ones would have been a punchier and scarier read but needed a ruthless edit to get it there. The historical writing of the piece also made it quite hard to feel invested and also to properly feel anything for the characters as well which didn’t help – you felt kept at arms-length throughout.

Overall, The Lost Ones is gothic, atmospheric historical horror but with not enough going on for my tastes. Thank you to NetGalley & HQ Stories for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In my role as English Teacher, I love being able to spend time reviewing books for our school library which I use to help the students make great picks when they visit us as well as running a library junior and senior book group where we meet every week and share the books we love and talk about what makes a great read. This is certainly a book that I'd be happy to display at the front as one of my monthly 'top picks' which often transform into 'most borrowed' between students and staff. It's a great read and ties in with my ethos of wishing to assemble a diverse, modern and thought-provoking range of books that will inspire and deepen a love of reading in our students of all ages. This book answers this brief in spade! It has s fresh and original voice and asks the readers to think whilst hooking them with a compelling storyline and strong characters It is certainly a book that I've thought about a lot after finishing it and I've also considered how we could use some of its paragraphs in supporting and inspiring creative writing in the school through the writers' circle that we run. This is a book that I shall certainly recommend we purchase and look forward to hearing how much the staff and students enjoy this memorable and thought-provoking read.

Wasn't a great fan of this. I thought it sounded brilliant whoch was why I requested it. It was written well but just not my cup of tea :)