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What does it mean to be haunted? Why do certain places give us a sense of the uncanny? And should we run from the things that haunt us, or embrace them? In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself struck by a family tragedy. In his grief, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the writers through the ages who have confronted what comes after death. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the 'sequestered places' of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our barren shores and our mysterious and ancient woodlands. At the same time he explores how these places conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of our literature and cinema, from the ghost stories of MR James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to Alan Garner and Susan Cooper's fantasies, from WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift's Waterland to Robin Hardy's 'folk horror' film The Wicker Man.Ghostland is an evocative and moving exploration of what haunted these writers and artists, and what is it that is haunting him. It is a unique meditation on grief, memory and longing, and the magical power of stories and nature.