The Whispering House

by Elizabeth Brooks

Overview

"Eerie and addictive. . . . Like Wuthering Heights, The Whispering House is a melancholy novel, its characters filled with dark longings." — The New York Times Book Review

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.

Freya Lyell is struggling to move on from her sister Stella’s death five years ago. Visiting the bewitching Byrne Hall, only a few miles from the scene of the tragedy, she discovers a portrait of Stella—a portrait she had no idea existed, in a house Stella never set foot in. Or so she thought.

Driven to find out more about her sister’s secrets, Freya is drawn into the world of Byrne Hall and its owners: charismatic artist Cory and his sinister, watchful mother. But as Freya lingers in this mysterious, centuries-old house, her relationship with Cory crosses the line into obsession and the darkness behind the locked doors of the estate threatens to spill out.

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951142377
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	388
Sales rank:	536,168
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Elizabeth Brooks is the author of The Orphan of Salt Winds, The Whispering House, and The House in the Orchard. She grew up in Chester, England, graduated from Cambridge University, and resides on the Isle of Man with her husband and two children.

Editorial Reviews

01/11/2021

Brooks (The Orphan of Salt Winds) cooks up a spellbinding gothic story featuring a sinister country house. Aspiring poet Freya Lyell, 23, mourns the apparent death by suicide of her mercurial older sister, Stella, at 21, who jumped from a cliff not far from stately Byrne Hall in England’s West Country. Five years on, Freya and her father attend a cousin’s wedding on the grounds of the imposing house. After a few drinks and the glimpse of a mysterious man emerging from the cliff path, Freya wanders into the house’s front hall to discover a portrait of a girl who appears to be Stella. When she returns to inquire about the picture, she is lured into a web of dark intrigue spun by the house’s inhabitants: artist Cory Byrne, who remembers having Stella pose for him a week before her death, and Cory’s enigmatic mother, Diana. While there is never any doubt who the bad guys and good guys are, the yarn moves swiftly and with sufficient suspense to its predictable denouement, Brooks’s lean prose never getting in the way of the plot. This is an exquisitely creepy page-turner. Agent, Sarah Levitt, Aevitas Creative. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"With a compelling narrator, absorbing atmosphere, and loads of literary references, this modern gothic novel is a stunner."

The Modern Mrs. Darcy Summer Reading Guide

"A gothic mystery whose ethereal tone and atmospheric detail allow it to step lightly between heavy revelations."

BookPage

"A compelling gothic tale."

City Book Review

"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

"Spooky and captivating. . . . this unsettling story about heartache and yearning is filled with bone-chilling breezes, taunting ghosts and maddening isolation."

Shelf Awareness

"Eerie and addictive. . . . Like Wuthering Heights, The Whispering House is a melancholy novel, its characters filled with dark longings."

The New York Times Book Review

"Love the gothic vibes of Brooks’s new novel."

CrimeReads

"Shimmering, lush, with prose that beats at the heart, The Whispering House will keep you up all night. Elizabeth Brooks has written a gothic mystery like no other."

Rene Denfeld

2021-01-13
In a house as old and (apparently) stately as Byrne Hall, there are certain to be secrets behind locked doors.

Freya Lyell’s life has felt paused since her sister, Stella, committed suicide five years prior by throwing herself off the cliffs near Byrne Hall, an idyllic manor on the English coast. When Freya gets drunk at a cousin’s wedding held on the estate’s grounds (a somewhat insensitive wedding location, Freya believes), she stumbles on a portrait that eerily resembles her dead sister. Later, unable to get this portrait out of her mind, she leaves the routine of her young adult life in London (work, swim, home to dad) and heads back to Byrne Hall to try to find some answers. What she’s met with, however, are not answers but an almost instantaneous happiness that feels off-kilter with the issues that keep circling in her thoughts—her sister’s suicide, her mother’s death when she was 5, and her ensuing troubled childhood. Bolstering this happiness is her whirlwind romance with would-be portrait artist Cory Byrne, who lives in Byrne Hall, his family estate, with his ailing mother and takes Freya as his all-consuming muse. But even in her newfound elation, a darkness—almost a morbidness—lingers uncomfortably close: “In every version I kiss him right back, and it’s almost like the last scene in the movie—except that there’s an old woman curled up on the bed, and her fingers are twitching restlessly on top of the sheets.” When Brooks suddenly shifts the narrative back in time to when Stella was alive, the darkness bubbling beneath creaky floorboards begins to boil over. Brooks’ elegant prose and artfully written protagonist keep this somewhat predictable thriller from feeling formulaic.

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

Kirkus Reviews