The Whispering House

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"Will keep you up all night.... A gothic mystery like no other." Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Butterfly Girl

From the acclaimed author of The Orphan of Salt Winds

It was like holding a couple of jigsaw pieces in my palm, knowing there was a whole picture to be made, if I could only find the rest.

Simmering and mysterious, The Whispering House trades in secrets: of a son haunted by his family's unsettling past, and a young woman uncovering the truth about her sister's last days.

On a warm summer's day by the English seaside, twenty-three-year-old Freya spies a pale, pillared house: Byrne Hall. Before she can think twice, she's stepped inside to an ornate foyer featuring a striking portrait that evokes her late sister, Stella, whose untimely fall from a cliff years before still haunts Freya and her father. When an inexplicable longing leads her back to Byrne Hall several weeks later, she meets Cory, a handsome and enigmatic young artist who remains in the house to care for his ailing mother. Though she plans to stay for just a few days, Freya finds herself extending her stay longer and longer, driven to remain not just by Byrne Hall itself, but this strange mother-and-son pair who inhabit it.

Freya's decision to linger in this mysterious, centuries-old house sets off an unexpected chain of events that will lead her to question who she is, and what really happened to Stella. As the days stretch on, a kind of shadow communication with her late sister begins as Freya explores the estate, and the relationships that Stella formed there.

In prose as lush and atmospheric as Byrne Hall itself, Elizabeth Brooks weaves a simmering, propulsive tale in The Whispering House of art, sisterhood, and all-consuming love: the ways it can lead us towards tenderness, nostalgia, and longing, as well as shocking acts of violence.

"The Whispering House is atmospheric and creepy, and as needy, nostalgic Freya is pulled deeper and deeper into its shadows, the reader's worry for her grows — and, with it, the novel's suspense. Freya is haunted by words she wishes she could take back, the sister she lost, the love that never was, the hopes for the future that she couldn't attain; all of these materialize in the deep shadows and shifting portrait-eyes of Byrne Hall. Brooks has crafted a slow-simmering, psychological, gothic novel about grief and longing." Booklist

"Brooks cooks up a spellbinding gothic story featuring a sinister country house. This is an exquisitely creepy page-turner." Publishers Weekly

"Eerie, gripping, and macabre: a gothic romance for the contemporary age." Kirkus Reviews

Elizabeth Brooks' debut novel, The Orphan of Salt Winds, was hailed by BuzzFeed as "evocative, gothic, and utterly transportive." She grew up in Chester, England, graduated from Cambridge University, and resides on the Isle of Man with her husband and two children.