I stopped being a woman a long time ago...

It’s 1610 and Jacobean London is full of dangers, from the plague to plots and revolutions.

In Shakespeare’s Ghost, Mary Hoffman provides an imaginative answer to one of the great questions about Shakespeare’s work: why, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream onwards, are his plays increasingly peopled by fairies, witches, ghosts and apparitions?

For William Shakespeare, life has taken an unexpected turn: one that will transform his writing. Haunted by a familiar spirit, he is urged to include more and more paranormal events and characters in his work.

Meanwhile, Ned Lambert, a young player in Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men, is having inexplicable experiences of his own, with a beautiful and elusive woman in green who is not of this world. Now a man on and off the stage, Ned is caught between fears and temptations. The poet is his friend, as is the popular young Prince of Wales, but is the mysterious woman he sees friend or foe?

‘One of the liveliest and most captivating historical fantasies about Shakespeare’s imagination since Susan Cooper’s King of Shadows.’

—Amanda Craig