A story haunted by secrets and lies within a large gothic family home. Good paced story with strong characters. Parts of the story however seemingly predictable. Still a good read.

What a fabulous book.  This would make an amazing movie.  A spooky tale of a grieving heroine.  Had me gripped from the first page.

1917 and England is in the full grip of war. Stella Marcham a nurse on the front line in France holds her wounded Fiancé as he dies sending Stella into a spiral of unbearable grief. Back home in England it is her beloved sister Madeleine who helps her through the worst. When Stella is asked to go stay at Greyswick with her sister who is now pregnant she is happy to help.
Madeleine is not happy at Greyswick, she hears crying from an empty nursery and feels an unsettling presence in the house. Her mother in law and the other residents of Greyswick feel that Madeleine is "hysterical" and imagining things. However when Stella also hears the crying Madeleine feels vindicated but still no one is convinced. A wounded veteran is brought in to prove there is nothing untoward going on but as the noises and strange occurrences  ramp up it's clear that there are some secrets that must be exposed before anyone in the house will be allowed any peace.
I loved the character of Stella - she is strong in an age when strong women were looked upon with suspicion and having their own ideas and opinions led to them becoming labelled hysterical trouble makers.

what a truly stunning book. the imagery, the setting and the characters were all so alive, I felt them next to me. the writing was so beautiful, I found myself reading page after page not wanting to put the book down. I read this in a few days, and would recommend it to all my loved ones.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Great book. I loved reading it. Very interesting and covers alot of information

Apologies this feedback is so late - I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am delighted to see it has done so well.

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%.

The Lost Ones by debut novelist, Anita Frank, was a good story.  Although, I personally found it to be a little slow.  Set in 1917, Stella is shrouded in grief over the death of her fiance.  She travels to stay with her sister at her mansion in Greyswick.  But the mansion has an uneasy atmosphere.  3 stars

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.