Reviewing Mairi MacInnes's Elsewhere & Back, Helen Dunmore praised her 'restless, ranging poems', noting how her poems 'hint at rather than state in order to create a powerful sense of the identity of place. Place always seems more important than the characters who are temporarily rooted in it' (Observer). In the new poems of The Ghostwriter, Mairi MacInnes's characters have become more rooted, but are still restless and edgy. Her focus now is more on the people set against her North Country landscapes, on their fragility in the face of life, on tensions and anxieties.