The Hanged Man and the Fortune Teller

London, 2017. A long-dead ghost—nameless, all but formless, trapped beyond both the living and the afterlife—drifts through time in search of himself. What happened to him? To the love of his life? His memories slip away like the tide, tantalizingly close but always receding.

His lost world of steam, family, and horrific tragedy comes to him in flickers and gasps. But decades—the steam age, the war years, the age of counterculture—soon melt and disappear, consumed by a strange, hungry world of electricity and isolation.

As more of him slips away each day, this nameless ghost is shepherded by a fellow spirit, his sole companion in our foreign reality—a circus fortune teller tethered to him by a tragic history of her own.

Eerie and atmospheric, The Hanged Man and the Fortune Teller unveils a mystery written in the gaps of memory. With insight and daring, Lucy Banks probes the deepest fears of our age on memory, mortality, and what it means to be human. Echoing the haunting voices of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson, Banks conjures the longing that comes over us in our lonely moments, when we shiver and feel the presence of someone near us in the dark.