At the graveside, a single cloud drifts over Canterbury and slowly takes the shape of a crocodile. Emily Beauchamp almost turns to point it out to her brother Billy, who always saw dragons and giants where she saw dogs and horses, and then remembers that he is in the smallest of the three coffins being lowered in front of her. Land of Ghosts by E L James opens on that half-turn, the reflex of a love that has not yet caught up with the facts, and the novel never entirely leaves it.
Emily is seventeen. A drunk driver has killed her parents, both music teachers, and seven-year-old Billy, and she is moving from a cluttered Kent cottage into the white, silent Chiswick house of the man her parents named as her guardian. Somewhere in that house is a boy who died there, and he is the only person who seems to understand what she has become.
A Guardian Who Is Barely Grown
The quiet triumph of Land of Ghosts by E L James is Dylan Knightley. He is her mother’s adopted stepbrother, a junior hospital doctor not yet thirty, a man who irons his life flat and then has a mute, starving teenager dropped into it. He fights her over every meal, one slice of toast at a time, and celebrates the morning she asks for crumpets as if she had passed an exam. His temper is fright in disguise, and the novel knows it: when he shouts, the next scene usually finds him on the floor beside her, apologising.
The best scene in the book belongs to them. Hunting for coat hangers, Emily finds a lumpy clay pot on Dylan’s chest of drawers, painted in his football team’s colours by Billy, and she folds onto the carpet. Dylan sits down against the wall next to her, and the two of them end up laughing about a seven-year-old who supported the wrong club. James writes that kind of grief with real precision: the guilt of a forgotten afternoon, a stranger’s child glimpsed in a supermarket, the fear that a mother’s voice is already fading. The counselling sessions, with a psychiatrist and then a bereavement counsellor who refuses to let her deflect, are handled without condescension. Readers who have lived through sudden loss will recognise the stubborn survivor guilt that Emily keeps returning to, and the novel takes care not to make it pretty.
Music does the rest. Emily plays her mother’s cello, which she has privately named Cecilia, and the first time she draws the bow through a Bach prelude after the crash, the noise in her head goes quiet.
Lulu, Dylan’s glamorous girlfriend, could easily have been a cardboard rival. Instead she is allowed to be jealous, thoughtless and then unexpectedly kind, kneeling to wash Dylan’s cut feet after he has chased Emily barefoot down the street. Small reversals like that give Land of Ghosts by E L James a household that feels lived in, where adults make mistakes in front of a teenager and then have to repair them.
The Boy in the Back Bedroom
Emily herself is better company than many YA narrators in her position. She is clever, with a sheaf of top exam grades she can barely bring herself to open, sharp-tongued once the numbness lifts, and stubborn enough to plan an escape back to Kent with a jar of saved coins. Her habit of reminding herself to stay polite, even while she is falling apart, is a small and telling detail.
Tristan Fairfax is the other half of the book, and the less steady one. He is nineteen, foul-mouthed, funny and plainly lonely, a former squatter who died in the room Emily has chosen and painted pink. Their early scenes have a sparky, teasing rhythm, and the idea that grief might make a person visible to the dead is a lovely one. For its first third, Land of Ghosts by E L James handles him with a light touch, letting his rudeness puncture the solemnity of a house in mourning and letting Emily answer back.
The trouble is what the novel asks readers to admire. His jealousy is dressed as gallantry: he sulks when Dylan hugs her, decides what she should wear and slips into her head without permission, and each lapse is forgiven because he is beautiful and devoted. A sceptical reader may notice that the living guardian respects Emily’s privacy more than the ghost who claims to adore her. The romance is also far warmer than the YA shelf usually allows. Much of it takes place in dreams, and by the final chapters those dreams include explicit sexual content involving a seventeen-year-old narrator. The book’s own opening note flags strong language, sexual threat, drug use, disordered eating, suicidal thoughts and bereavement, and it recommends the novel for older teens and adults. That advice deserves to be taken seriously.
Rules E L James Will Not Explain
The supernatural design is pleasingly odd and deliberately withheld. Tristan keeps citing rules he is forbidden to explain, and the purple dream moor he leads Emily onto suggests a larger country beyond the house. That restraint pays off in the final chapters of Land of Ghosts by E L James, which move at a speed the rest of the book never attempts and leave several doors swinging.
The middle stretch is less disciplined. A murder mystery is planted early, then parked for long periods while the romance circles. The prose leans on a small stock of phrases for eyes, hair and blushes, and the same arguments between Emily and Tristan about her uncle replay with little variation. American spelling sits strangely in a novel so rooted in London.
What E L James Brings From Fifty Shades
James spent decades in television before she began writing, and she studied history at the University of Kent; her heroine, fittingly, grows up in a village outside Canterbury. Her acknowledgments describe this story as one that stayed with her for many years before reaching print, and she has called it a book about love after loss. That is an accurate description. Land of Ghosts by E L James keeps her old instinct for an intense, secretive young man, but it points that instinct at mourning rather than glamour, and the shift mostly works.
It is the first of two books, published in the US by Bloom Books and in the UK by evermore, and a sequel is due in 2027. Almost nothing important is resolved here, so readers should treat it as the first half of a single story.
Readers drawn to the novel’s tenderness about loss might try After Life by Gayle Forman, which approaches grief from the other side of death, and If I Stopped Haunting You by Colby Wilkens, a lighter romance with a ghost at its heart. Wuthering Heights remains the great English novel of a love that refuses to stay buried.
What It Leaves Behind
The grief in Land of Ghosts by E L James is the real thing: specific, embarrassing, funny at odd moments and never cured on schedule. The love story built on top of it is shakier, more possessive than it knows and older than its label. What lingers longest is a man in his twenties sitting on a bedroom floor with a clay pot, learning that looking after someone means sitting still while they fall apart.