Whilst on holiday, Tom and Kate discover "Greyghost," a mysterious ruined house. On a return visit they encounter a strange ghostly mist which appears to transport them back through time to the period when the house was intact and occupied, where they meet Rebecca, a beautiful young girl who is confined to a wheelchair. In a further visit they do battle with the vile and villainous Uncle Ronald and Aunt Clarissa who are trying to take over Greyghost and send Rebecca away. After a ghostly experience in a cellar the three children make a desperate attempt to escape the clutches of the two...

Boleslaw Prus is often compared to Chekhov, and Prus's masterpiece might be described as an intimate epic, a beautifully detailed, utterly absorbing exploration of life in late-nineteenth-century Warsaw, which is also a prophetic reckoning with some of the social forces--imperialism, nationalism, anti-Semitism among them--that would soon convulse Europe as never before. But The Doll is above all a brilliant novel of character, dramatizing conflicting ideas through the various convictions, ambitions, confusions, and frustrations of an extensive and varied cast. At the center of...