The Ghost Notebooks: A Novel

by Ben Dolnick

Overview

A Belletrist Book Club Pick

When Nick Beron and Hannah Rampe decide to move from New York City to the tiny upstate town of Hibernia, they’re in desperate need of a change: their careers have flatlined, the city is exhausting, and they’ve reached a relationship stalemate. So Hannah accepts a job as live-in director of the Wright Historic House, a museum dedicated to an obscure nineteenth-century philosopher whose life was marred by tragedy.

At first, life in this old, creaky house feels cozy. Nick and Hannah explore the deserted museum at night, wandering the twisting halls and sneakily trying out the former owners’ original master bed. But as summer turns to fall, Hannah begins to have trouble sleeping; reluctantly, she tells Nick she’s hearing whispers in the night. Then one morning, Nick wakes up to find Hannah gone. In his frantic search for her, Nick will discover the hidden legacy of Wright House: a man driven wild with grief, and a spirit aching for home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101971611
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/22/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

BEN DOLNICK is the author of the novels At the Bottom of Everything, You Know Who You Are, and Zoology. His work has appeared in GQ and The New York Times, and on NPR. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and with his wife and daughter.

Read an Excerpt

A component of our trouble—the thing that had taken our dis­content from the back burner and poured it directly onto our laps—was that Hannah had, a few months earlier, been laid off.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Ghost Notebooks"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Ben Dolnick.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Reading Group Guide

This guide is intended to enrich your reading group meeting by providing topics of conversation associated with the book. The supernatural elements in the story may invoke lively discussion, so feel free to use these questions as guidelines only, and let your meeting take its own course!

1. How do the quoted signs and teaching materials from the Wright Historic House add to the story?

2. Why does Nick agree to move with Hannah to the Wright Museum?

3. What prompted Nick to propose to Hannah?

4. What do you think Hannah is looking for in her new setting?

5. How would you feel living in a house that is also a museum?

6. The neighbors talk about things happening at the Wright Historic House in the past. What impact do these rumors have on Hannah and Nick?

7. One of Edmund Wright’s quotes is “Oh, what happy hours and torments, what odysseys unwritten and invisible, have taken place within this study’s sorry walls . . .” Describe some of the happy hours and torments Nick and Hannah go through in the Wright house.

8. What are torments that the other occupants of the house (such as the Wrights, the Kemps, or the former caretaker Jim) lived through?

9. Describe the progression of Nick’s and Hannah’s relationship throughout the book.

10. Discuss Hannah’s descent as she becomes obsessed with Edmund Wright’s notebooks.

11. How are Hannah’s notebook entries (as excerpted in the book) an indication of her state of mind?

12. In what way does the episode with the baby birds foreshadow Hannah’s death?

13. How does Nick initially react to Hannah’s death?

14. How was Hannah’s relationship with her parents different from Nick’s relationship with his?

15. Discuss Nick’s time with the Rampes. What about this situation leads to Nick’s breakdown?

16. After Nick leaves the Rampes, he breaks into Dr. Blythe’s office and steals Hannah’s file. How does reading the doctor’s notes affect him?

17. Nick drives back to the museum to find his belongings packed up. He is told by one of the Wrighters that Hannah didn’t die by accident or because of depression, but because she found something out about the house. How does Nick react to this information?

18. When Nick is arrested, he says: “[H]ere it was, finally—the punishment I’d been racing toward.” Discuss what this means.

19. In the mental hospital, Nick meets Jim. What do you think of the story Jim tells him? Do you believe it is true, or is it two mentally ill patients talking together?

20. After he breaks out of the hospital, Nick returns to Wright House, where he dreams that Hannah enters his body, begging for his help. He is exhausted, freezing, and starving. How much of the dream do you believe is real?

21. After digging up Wright’s grave and finding the notebooks, Nick decides to burn the house down. Why would fire be the answer to freeing the ghosts? Is the house itself the real problem?

22. Do you believe in ghosts? Do you think the events of the story are the result of the supernatural or the psychological?

23. In the end, whose notebooks do you think the title refers to—Edmund Wright’s or Hannah’s?

Editorial Reviews

What urban couple wouldn’t want to trade the din of the Q train for the sound of crickets, exchange a cramped apartment for a spacious old building steeped in history, only a few hours’ drive from downtown Manhattan? Think again. Ben Dolnick’s elegant, eerie new novel suggests it might be better to stay in Queens… Dolnick excels at creating a subtle, growing sense of unease… The greater mystery unveiled in this powerful novel lies not in spooky atmospherics, but our own failure to connect with those closest to us.” 
—Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post 

"Looking for another provocative porthole to the past? Try Ben Dolnick’s fourth novel, The Ghost Notebooks. The plot provides a durable framework for Mr. Dolnick’s keen eye for detail and his penetrating ear for dialogue."
—Sam Roberts, The New York Times

“A missing fiancée and a haunted house in the Hudson Valley are at the enigmatic center of Ben Dolnick’s The Ghost Notebooks, but the real mystery is how well we know those closest to us.”
—Vogue 

"An insightful look at our visions and revisions as we grapple with love and grief… You’ll also likely laugh. A lot."
—Cory Oldweiler, AM New York
 
"A ghost story, a mystery, and a love story in one."
—Elizabeth Entenman, Hello Giggles

"Dolnick’s most thematically ambitious work… He has a gift for metaphor, a way of expressing complex emotions and relationships with a pithy comparison that’s easy to understand but genuinely illuminating, and at the same time isn’t a cliché and never feels cutesy… Over a series of short, quietly powerful novels, Dolnick has emerged as an author of compulsive readability and real insights."
—Ryan Vlastelica, The A.V. Club

"For all its curiosity about things that go bump in the night, the most notable features in The Ghost Notebooks are its qualities of light. Ben Dolnick’s charm, lucidity, and insight will come as no surprise to his growing band of fans. Count me one of them."
 —Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire

"In this compelling mix of love story, detective story, and ghost story, [Dolnick] takes a haunting look at what might follow life."
—Michele Leber, Booklist
 
"Hannah loses her job and applies to be live-in caretaker of the Wright Historic House upstate. She and her fiancé Nick leave Astoria with dreams of a simpler, reinvigorated relationship. And then Hannah disappears. This Brooklyn author delivers an affecting and original take on love, loss, and grief in assured writing that is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes in the same sentence."
—Cory Oldweiler, AM New York's “Must-Read Books in 2018”
 
"Dolnick's immersive novel, about how little people know about their loved ones, adds a supernatural element to that topic . . . Nick's convincing narration, a chronicle of blind spots and good intentions, is chief among the devices Dolnick deploys to give familiar motifs a contemporary sensibility in this ghost tale, love story, mystery, and bildungsroman."
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Graham Halstead is the featured narrator of this tale of ghosts, past and present, who haunt Nick Beron and Hannah Rampe, the newest caretakers of the Wright Historic House in Hibernia, New York. Halstead delivers this ghostly tale in a low tone that rises and falls with the characters’ emotional stress. Little by little, the ghosts make their appearances, particularly to Hannah, who slowly loses touch with reality. In addition, Halstead captures Nick, who eventually finds himself also wrestling with reality and the ghosts that haunt him. While Halstead performs the bulk of the story, the rest of the cast read diary entries written in notebooks by past inhabitants, now ghosts, of Wright House. Insanity, loss, and sorrow are woven seamlessly into this haunting tale in which the present is a transitory thing. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

Graham Halstead is the featured narrator of this tale of ghosts, past and present, who haunt Nick Beron and Hannah Rampe, the newest caretakers of the Wright Historic House in Hibernia, New York. Halstead delivers this ghostly tale in a low tone that rises and falls with the characters’ emotional stress. Little by little, the ghosts make their appearances, particularly to Hannah, who slowly loses touch with reality. In addition, Halstead captures Nick, who eventually finds himself also wrestling with reality and the ghosts that haunt him. While Halstead performs the bulk of the story, the rest of the cast read diary entries written in notebooks by past inhabitants, now ghosts, of Wright House. Insanity, loss, and sorrow are woven seamlessly into this haunting tale in which the present is a transitory thing. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile