Anbara Salam

An evocative, atmospheric story of friendship and obsession set in the 1950s that follows two schoolgirls from Connecticut whose lives are changed forever when they travel to a silent convent in northern Italy to study art for a year Isabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their Connecticut Catholic school, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella. In 1957, when the girls graduate, they land coveted spots at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Pentila in northern Italy, a prestigious art history school in the grounds of a silent convent. There, free of her claustrophobic home and the town that will always see her and her Egyptian mother as outsiders, Bridget discovers she can re-invent herself as anyone she desires. Only Isabella knows the real Bridget, just as Bridget knows the true Isabella. But as that glittering year goes on, Bridget begins to suspect Isabella is keeping secrets from her, secrets that will ruin all of her plans and that will change the course of their lives forever.

Hazardous Spirits brilliantly captures a young woman’s world unsettled by mediums and spirits, revealing the devastating secrets that ghosts from the past can tell when given the voice to do so. In 1920s Edinburgh, Scotland, Evelyn Hazard is a young, middle-class housewife living the life she’s always expected―until her husband Robert upends everything with a startling announcement: he can communicate with the dead. As the couple is pulled into the spiritualist movement―an underground, occult society of ritual and magic that emerged following the mass deaths of the Spanish Flu and First World War―Evelyn’s carefully composed world begins to unravel. And when long-held secrets from her past threaten to come to the surface, presenting her with the prospect of losing all she holds dear, Evelyn finds herself unable to avoid the question: is the man she loves a fraud, a madman or―most frighteningly―is he telling the truth? Cloaked in a moody, beguiling backdrop of twentieth-century Scotland, Anbara Salam’s Hazardous Spirits brings a sparkling sense of period detail and dry humor to the life of a young woman calibrating her place in a changing world, and her shifting relationship with a man she thought she knew.