A short account of how British officials at the consulates in Tripoli, and Alexandria in 1826-7 tried to exploit their chance contact with Jafar, the son of the Sultan of Wadai (in Chad) to open up political and trade opportunities for Britain in Central Africa. But who was Jafar, and what did happen to him? In Nicholas Foster's ghost stories, eight old university friends meet to tell strange and haunting tales from their lives. While their subtle and uncanny ghost stories are more thoughtful than violent, they often bring the past into the present with a short, sharp shock. Ranging from the Baltic Sea to the Sudan and from 17th century London to Tibet, these well-sourced and varied stories blend history and crime with the emphasis always on the characters and the lives that they lead. Travelling in the footsteps of M R James and Roald Dahl, they are stories as puzzles and stories with an after-life. As one reviewer has said, these stories are "subtly disturbing tales, that will appeal to those who prefer their supernatural to be gore-free but suffused with discomfit and anxiety of the most sophisticated sort...They always feel authentically experienced rather than merely 'well-researched'... The tales are structured as Chinese box narratives that disorient the reader just enough to leave you unprepared for the jolting manifestation of the uncanny: this is story-telling as conjuring, in both the obvious senses of the word."'Collected Ghost Stories' contains in one free ebook all the 23 linked ghost stories published previously on Smashwords and Draft2Digital. There's also a paperback version of the first sixteen ghost stories - 'The Consul from Tunis: and other ghost stories'.Many of the stories draw on countries and places where the author has lived and worked, but all the characters are fictitious, even the ghosts. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.To find out more, watch the excellent 'For Whom the Book Tolls' podcast where there's an interesting and enjoyable review of 'The Consul from Tunis: and other ghost stories'.
