Sphere bags Haunting Season follow-up with stories from Ward, Collins and more

Sphere has obtained rights to a second collection of ghost stories from a roster of bestselling authors following the success of The Haunting Season.

Commissioning editor Rosanna Forte acquired world rights to The Winter Spirits, which will feature new stories from all eight of the authors who contributed to The Haunting Season—Bridget Collins, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Natasha Pulley, Jess Kidd, Andrew Michael Hurley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Laura Purcell and Elizabeth Macneal. It will also feature stories by Stuart Turton, Catriona Ward, Susan Stokes-Chapman and Laura Shepherd-Robinson. 

The book will be published in autumn 2023, following the release of The Haunting Season paperback later this year. The Haunting Season published in hardback in October 2021, becoming the only short story anthology to ever hit the Sunday Times chart, reaching number seven, according to the publisher. It also picked up the award for best overall fiction campaign of the autumn at the Book Marketing Society Awards. 

The Winter Spirits aims to reinvent the tradition of the seasonal ghost story for the modern audience, but this time all the stories will focus on Christmas or Advent as a theme.  

Forte said: “Publishing The Haunting Season and working with this incredibly talented array of authors has been one of the highlights of my career. The spirit of collaboration between all involved—the authors, their wonderful agents and the brilliant team at Little, Brown—made every step of the process a real joy and it was thrilling to see our passion echoed by booksellers and readers. I’m so excited to be working with the whole Haunting Season team again and to be adding the enormous talents of Stuart, Catriona, Susan and Laura to this next collection.”