Susan Hill wrote her first ghost story, The Woman in Black, over a six-week summer holiday nearly thirty years ago, and the play it inspired has been running in the West End since 1989. This autumn, she brings out The Small Hand, in which an antiquarian bookseller finds himself troubled by a phantom toddler. Sarah Waters’ fifth novel, The Little Stranger (2009), is set in a haunted mansion in Warwickshire, just after the Second World War. Described as ‘gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining’, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In a conversation interspersed with readings from their work, and chaired by novelist Philip Hensher, they discuss the seduction of the supernatural.

Recorded on Monday 22 November 2010.