Product Description
A Village branded by an ancient curse. ... Read more

Book Description
Work from the English novelist and poet, best known for his 1898 swashbuckler, Moonfleet.Download Description
While studying at Oxford, John Maltravers, a talented musician, finds that playing a certain air on his violin brings an invisible guest to his room. The ghostly visits become more frequent, until he eventually sees the figure of a man sitting and listening to his playing.His subsequent discovery of an old Stradivarius violin hidden in a secret cupboard in his room, while improving his skill as a musician, seems to cause a change in his character. As his violin playing becomes an obsession he is drawn away from his old values, his family and even his faith, towards more sinister interests.The tale of the possession of a young man by the restless spirit of an eighteenth century necromancer, 'The Lost Stradivarius' is a classic work of supernatural literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

For Meade Falkner Fans
Not the greatest story ever, but for fans of Moonfleet who wish to see another facet of John Meade Falkner mind, it is well worth reading.
It is a strange, sometimes eerie story, which will keep your attention until the very end.

In excelsis, de profundis
John Meade Falkner did not seem to consider novel-writing the most important thing in his life; he wrote three novels in a matter of less than ten years, and spend the rest of his life as an antiquarian, a librarian, and the top executive of a major munitions manufacturing firm. But the three Gothic novels he wrote are all one of a kind and were written with an incredible sense of surety and deftness. THE LOST STRADIVARIUS is a beautifully constructed ghost story, concerning a Victorian Oxford student and music aficionado who discovers an eighteenth-century Italian musical suite; when he plays a certain section of it with his friend in his rooms in Magdalen Hall, a presence seems to stir around them. This only starts the tale, which manages to synthesize a fantastic array of fin-de-siecle concerns, including homoeroticism (as Tom Paulin suggests in his brief foreword to this nice little Hesperus edition, the figure of Oscar Wilde surely haunts this work as much as the fictional ghost of Adrian Temple), decadence, anti-Catholicism, and Paterian aestheticism. The great pleasures of Falkner's fiction are his striking ability to convey atmosphere and his precocious gift for showing and not telling when it comes to character and suspense.

Timeless ghost story
The ghost story is by & large ideally realized as a short story or atmost novella -- the greatest masters, such as M. R. James, never evenattempted the novel form; & those who did both short stories andnovels, such as E. F. Benson, only the short stories are of outstandingmerit. At novel length they tend to bog down considerably or else descendinto tedious gothicisms & inessential asides. But Falkner's THE LOSTSTRADIVARIUS is a perfect gem of a novel, a timeless tale of weird &awe inspiring ghostliness, easily in the top ten of Victorian ghost novels,in an unfailingly elegant style.

-Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Violet Books ... Read more