A forgotten children’s classic is coming back into print after more than 30 years, on the back of Mark Gatiss’s new version of the 1972 movie The Amazing Mr Blunden, which comes to TV this Christmas.

Ahead of the festive production directed by and starring Gatiss, who appears alongside Tamsin Greig and Simon Callow, Virago Books is republishing the original 1969 novel by Antonia Barber, which was last in print in the UK in 1988.

Originally titled The Ghosts, Barber’s book will appear under The Amazing Mr Blunden title as a tie-in to the film, which will be broadcast on Sky Max.

Although The Ghosts was shortlisted for the Carnegie medal when it first came out, and was given a movie-tie in edition when the Lionel Jeffries big-screen adaptation was released in 1972, it fell out of print; secondhand copies are scarce and selling for upwards of £100 online.

The fact it is back in print at all is testimony not only to Gatiss reviving interest, but the tenacity of Virago editor Donna Coonan.

Coonan was first introduced to the novel a decade ago, and immediately fell in love with Barber’s story of siblings Lucy and Jamie who move to a dilapidated country mansion in 1918 when their mother is offered a job as housekeeper by the mysterious solicitor Mr Blunden.

But Blunden has an ulterior motive as Lucy and Jamie discover when they encounter what appear to be the ghosts of two children who lived in the house a century before.

Sara and her younger brother Georgie are seeking help before they die in a fire at the hands of the evil housekeeper Mrs Wickens and her vile husband, who have designs on the orphans’ inheritance, so Lucy and Jamie have to travel back in time to avert tragedy.

Coonan said, “I was familiar with Antonia Barber but had never read this before, and I just thought that it was the most magical novel, kind of a wonderful children’s version of The Turn of the Screw.”

Coonan heads up the Virago children’s list, which publishes classic authors such as Nina Bawden and Joan Aiken. She was desperate to add The Ghosts to the list but as it wasn’t quite as well known as, say, Carrie’s War or The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, she was unable to justify it.

“I was really sad about it, because I just fell in love with the book. But I kept the idea by me, waiting for such a time as I could push for it, and that happened this year when Antonia Barber’s agency contacted me to say there was going to be a new film version of it, and I knew I had my chance.”

Coonan had already parted company with the secondhand book she had read almost a decade earlier, and had to quickly track down another copy – this time a tatty copy of the 1972 movie-tie in, retitled The Amazing Mr Blunden, which was published by Penguin with a still from the movie on the cover. It cost Coonan £45 from an online seller. And this was the book that formed the basis of the typesetting of the new version, released through Virago on 9 December.

Barber – who is perhaps better known for her 1991 picture book The Mousehole Cat, illustrated by Nicola Bayley and set in the Cornish seaside village where Barber lived, alongside her family home in Kent – died in 2019. The new version of The Ghosts, her second novel, will be published the day before what would have been her 89th birthday.

“I do wish she could have been here to see the new film and this new edition of her book, and the revived interest in her work,” said Coonan. “It has been out of print a long time but I am hoping many children will now make a discovery of this neglected work and it will become the children’s classic it has long deserved to be.”

Gatiss has long been a huge fan of both Barber’s novel and the 1972 film, which starred Laurence Naismith as Mr Blunden (which Callow will reprise for the new production) and Lynne Frederick, Garry Miller, Rosalyn Landor, and Marc Granger as the time-hopping children. For a limited edition Blu-ray release of the original movie a few years ago, Gatiss was interviewed for a special extra feature.

He told the Guardian, “I’m so thrilled Antonia Barber’s beloved classic is being reissued alongside my new screen version. It’s such a charming, strange and delicate story. Powerfully redemptive, moving and yet so much fun! The Wheel of Time turns again …”

• A preview of The Amazing Mr Blunden, followed by a Q&A with Mark Gatiss and cast members Tamsin Greig and Simon Callow, hosted by Mark Kermode, will take place at the BFI, Southbank, London, on 29 November at 6.15pm. Book tickets here.