For young Mark the world has turned as bleak and gray as the Brighton winter. Separated from his real father and home in London he's come to live with his mother and her new husband in an old house near the sea. He spends his days alone trying to master the skateboard while other boys his age are in school. He hates the unwanted stepfather who barged into Mark's life to rob him of joy. Worst of all his once-vibrant mother has grown listless and weary no longer interested in anything beyond her sitting room. But on a damp and chilly evening an accident carries Mark into the basement flat of the old woman who lives at the bottom of his stepfather's house. She offers tea cakes and sympathy . . . and the key to a secret bygone world. Mark becomes caught up in the frenetic bustle of the human machinery that once ran a home and drawn ever deeper into a lost realm of spirits and memory. Here below the suffocating truths beneath the pain and unhappiness he finds an escape and quite possibly a way to change everything. A richly evocative poignantly beautiful modern-day ghost story The Servants marks the triumphant return of Michael Marshall Smith—the first novel in a decade from the multiple award-winning author of Spares.
