Ghostwalking
Martin Evans talks to the historian of science Rebecca Stott about her new novel in which she explores unexplained events in the life of Isaac Newton, and considers the interactions between past and present.
Ghostwalk, Rebecca Stott’s first novel, begins in dramatic fashion with the death of a Cambridge historian, Elizabeth Vogelsang, in 2003. She is found floating in the river at the bottom of her garden, a prism clutched in her hand. In her study is an unfinished manuscript about Isaac Newton’s involvement in the pan-European networks of seventeenth-century alchemists.