Rooms

A spellbinding tale of guilt, love, and family secrets from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Oliver

Estranged patriarch Richard Walker has just died, leaving behind a country house full of rooms packed with the detritus of a lifetime. His alienated family—bitter ex-wife Caroline, troubled teenage son Trenton, and unforgiving daughter Minna—have arrived for their inheritance.

But the Walkers are not alone. Alice and Sandra, two long-dead and restless ghosts, linger within the house's claustrophobic walls, bound eternally to its physical structure. Jostling for space and memory, they observe the family, trading barbs and reminiscences about their past lives. Though their voices cannot be heard, Alice and Sandra speak through the house itself—in the hiss of the radiator, a creak in the stairs, the dimming of a light bulb.

The living and dead are haunted by painful truths that surface with explosive force. When a new ghost appears, and Trenton begins to communicate with her, the spirit and human worlds collide—with cataclysmic results.

Elegantly constructed and brilliantly paced, Rooms is an enticing and imaginative ghost story and a searing family drama that is as haunting as it is resonant.

“A sensational novel that easily glides between the normal and the paranormal. At times humorous, at times heartbreaking, ROOMS is always emotionally resonant and, despite the presence of ghosts, very, very real.” Ivy Pochoda author of Visitation Street

“A chilling ghost story, and much, much more: Rooms is a magnificent gothic fugue on the themes of longing and buried secrets.” Lev Grossman, bestselling author of The Magicians

“…in this spectral soap opera there's fun to be had as the plots many traps are set and then snapped shut.” New York Times

“ROOMS is, overall, a very successful work, and an impressive demonstration of Oliver's craft.” NPR

“In Oliver's moody and mysterious novel, a pair of ghosts inhabits the house of the recently deceased Richard Walker and serves as an invisible chorus to his family's bleak memories and motivations.” O magazine

“A powerful haunted house story … Excellently paced… Ultimately, Rooms is an outstanding novel, with a brilliant array of characters...compelling and difficult to put away...it has stuck with me in ways that few books do. Oliver's particular blend of fantasy is at times funny, other times heartbreaking.” io9

“[Oliver's] first novel for adults, Rooms, is a ghost story, but is completely unlike any we've read before… an elegant blend of real and supernatural worlds.” BookPage

“Oliver skillfully weaves her tales together clearly and cleanly… The real strength of this novel is Oliver's knack for rendering charmingly flawed characters with real-life problems and complicated relationships… Oliver's prose is crisp and clean; it gives the book much of its energy.” Washington Independent Review of Books

“A family faces its demons-such as sex addiction and alcoholism-when they gather after Dad's death. (Adding stress: His house has ghosts!) A complex first adult novel from the Delirium writer.” Us Weekly

“[Oliver] turns triumphantly to adult fiction with her latest, Rooms… The last 50 pages of Rooms are as devastatingly emotional as any book Ive recently encountered… For a thriller, that's as strong a recommendation as I can make.” Dallas Morning News

“Lauren Oliver, best known for her Delirium series, makes her adult debut with the stand-out Rooms, a creepy ghost story and domestic family drama rolled into one.” Publishers Weekly

Lauren Oliver is the author of the YA bestselling novels Before I Fall, Panic, and Vanishing Girls and the Delirium trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, and Requiem, which have been translated into more than thirty languages and are New York Times and international bestselling novels. She is also the author of three novels for middle grade readers: The Spindlers; Liesl & Po, which was an E. B. White Read Aloud Award nominee; and Curiosity House: The Shrunken Head, co-written with H. C. Chester, and a novel for adults, Rooms. A graduate of the University of Chicago and NYUs MFA program, Lauren Oliver is also the cofounder of the boutique literary development company Paper Lantern Lit.