The Hundred and Ninety-nine Steps

the long version

Tired of nightmares in which she meets a grisly end, Sian decides she needs to get out more, so she joins an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey. What she finds is a mystery involving a long-hidden murder, a man with big hands and a fragile manuscript in a bottle. Faber's dazzling novella takes up the 199 steps in Whitby that link the 21st century with the ruins of the past. Equal and indissoluble parts thriller, romance, historical/ghost story and meditation on the nature of sincerity, this is an ingenious literary page-turner. The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, deploys a masterful sense of ambiguity, works on many levels and, as always with Faber's writing, is elegant, thought-provoking, distinctive and compelling.