Madge didn't mean to kill her best friend, but what happens when the only choices you get to make are bad ones? Following the interwoven fates of three women and set in the North of England at the turn of the 20th century, Spirit Burns is a spell-binding tale that leads the reader behind the curtains of vaudeville theatre and into gin palaces, sweat-shops, seance cabinets, and the secret world of suffragette arsonists. Meet Madge - factory hand, gang member, and good-time girl. Then there's Ellen, who wants to burn the existing order to the ground, and Stella, sold into show-life as a young girl and forced to trade off her looks and her talent to survive. We're drawn into places where women are overlooked and their bodies exploited. Places where bad things happen. Places where people want revenge. Places where people - people like Madge, who only wanted to have a laugh - are haunted by what they did, and what was done to them. Roll up! Roll up! Enter a world where the boundaries between the living and the dead are blurred, and the ones who get caught in between get to tell their stories.