The Lost Stradivarius

The Lost Stradivarius, published in 1895, is J. Meade Falkner's first novel and one of the finest supernatural tales in English. When John Dorvington finds an exquisite violin concealed in his college rooms, a particular piece of music played upon it conjures an apparition linked to the instrument's dark history. Falkner constructs an atmosphere of mounting dread with remarkable economy, moving from the sunlit quads of Oxford to a haunted Italian villa. The novel is a quiet masterpiece of the ghost story form — subtle, learned, and genuinely unsettling.