EMILY Brontë features in the latest Yorkshire ghost story by novelist Karen Perkins.

Parliament Of Rooks is described as a haunting tale of Brontë country, showing that no matter how hard life is, humanity has the power to make it better or worse.

The book is the latest historical paranormal novel in the award-winning Yorkshire Ghosts series by Karen, who also writes Caribbean pirate adventures.

Karen said the story contrasted the beautiful and inspiring village of Haworth today with the slum – or ‘rookery’ – that it was during the Industrial Revolution.

She said the village was then rife with disease, heartache, poverty, and employing child slavery in the mills, with life expectancy in 1848 only 22.

Karen said: “Nine-year-old Harry Sutcliff hates working at Rooks Mill and is forever in trouble for running away to the wide empty spaces of the moors – empty but for the song of the skylark, the antics of the rabbits, and the explorations of Emily Brontë.

“Bound together by their love of the moors, Emily and Harry develop a lasting friendship, but not everyone is happy about it – especially Martha, Harry’s wife.

“As Martha’s jealous rages grow in ferocity, Harry does not realise the danger he is in; a danger that also threatens Verity and her new beau, William, 150 years later.

“Only time will tell if Verity and William have the strength to fight off the ghosts determined to shape their lives, or whether they will succumb to an age-old betrayal.”

Karen Perkins is the author of seven fiction titles in the Valkyrie series of Caribbean pirate adventures and the Yorkshire Ghosts series.

All of her fiction titles have appeared at the top of bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, including the top 50 in the UK Kindle Store.

Karen’s first Yorkshire Ghosts novel – The Haunting of Thores Cross – won the silver medal for European fiction in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards in New York, whilst her Valkyrie novel Dead Reckoning was long-listed in the 2011 MSLEXIA novel competition.

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