Frances and her Ghosts: (A semi-autobiographical novel)

(Paperback)

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Life exacts a price for Frances Thomas, a writer living an outwardly comfortable existence. Emotionally trapped by an intense empathy with the suffering of animals, shes compelled to take action for those imprisoned in a laboratory. Always conscious of the cruelties of the world, she reads the wind where others, unaware, wait for the storm to break. Her clear-seeing and emotional identity with human and animal victims, causes the edges of her reality to be become blurred when a rescued dog and a long-dead German-Jewish girl in 1930s Berlin, whose story she is scripting for a film, become as one, threatening to break her.

Author Bio

Rebecca Hughes Hall has explored the limits of compassion and the depths of cruelty, both between humans and other humans, and humans and animals. Being vegan, her guiding ideal has been that the compassion we extend to our own kind will one day be extended to all of creation. Her Welsh origins inform her love of poetic language and recurring themes of love, loss and hope. Rebecca worked as an editor before publishing book Animals Are Equal, documenting extraordinary communication between humans and other species. Her involvement with animal rights (founding Writers for the Abolition of Vivisection) informed Voiceless Victims, a ground-breaking study of animal abuse and maltreatment in the name of science. She published further non-fiction before writing the screenplay of the Klaus Mann novel The Volcano, about artists and writers fleeing Nazi Germany, winning a prize at the Montreal Film Festival. She also wrote a play for BBC Television and a stage play: a true story about a young servant girl in Regency-era Wales unjustly accused infanticide and hanged. Rebeccas abiding interest in WW2 led to her adapting for R4 Paul Gallicos The Lonely, a love story about an American fighter pilot. Her latest work, Frances and her Ghosts, a semi-autobiographical novel, set in 80s Britain and 30s Germany, was completed just before she was diagnosed with dementia and Parkinsons. A double tragedy for such an articulate writer.