Frances and her Ghosts
A semi-autobiographical novel
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, she’ s 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.
Rebecca Hughes Hall 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
