The Ghost of Sam Webster

Writer Daniel Hawthorne is packing up his mother’s house in Johannesburg when he hears about the disappearance of Sam Webster, the beautiful daughter of his friend, the famous historian Bruce Webster. When the body of Sam appears briefly on the banks of the flooded Buffalo River, Daniel decides to visit the Websters’ luxury lodge in the heart of Zululand. Under the guise of researching a new novel about his disgraced ancestor, the lepidopterist Lieutenant Charles Hawthorne, who fought in the Battle of iSandlwana, Daniel starts to investigate the reasons for Sam’s disappearance. The lines between loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, cowardice and courage, redemption and shame, soon become blurred as Daniel gets closer to the truth. Written in Craig Higginson’s masterful prose, The Ghost of Sam Webster is at once a war novel, a murder mystery, a multi-layered love story and a robust reassertion of what it is to remain human during the most challenging times.

Craig Higginson is an award-winning author and playwright who is based in Johannesburg. The Ghost of Sam Webster is his most haunting and ambitious novel to date, drawing together the epic historical sweep, the state-of-thenation resonance and the dramatic psychological complexity of his prizewinning and celebrated novels, The Landscape Painter (2011), The Dream House (2015) and The Book of Gifts (2020).