Starling House
The perfect dark, Gothic fairytale and a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
Step into Starling House, if you dare . . .
Alix E. Harrow reimagines Beauty and the Beast in this gorgeously modern Gothic fantasy, perfect for fans of V. E. Schwab and Naomi Novik.
This edition includes a bonus short story that reaches beyond the house's gnarly, tangled gates.
Opal is a lot of things – orphan, high-school dropout, full-time cynic. Most of all, she’s determined to find a better life for her younger brother. One that gets them both out of Eden, a town renowned for bad luck. So when Opal gets the chance to earn a good wage at Starling House, Eden’s very own haunted mansion, she can’t resist.
Her new workplace is uncanny and full of secrets – just like Arthur, its brooding heir. It also feels strangely, dangerously, like something Opal never had: a home. As sinister forces converge on Eden, Opal realizes she might finally have found a reason to stick around. But now she’ll have to fight for it . . .
This is a romantic and spellbinding Gothic fairytale from Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-shortlisted Alix E. Harrow.
Praise for Starling House
‘Alix E. Harrow is an exceptional, undeniable talent‘ – Olivie Blake, author of The Atlas Six
‘Alix E. Harrow’s greatest work yet‘ – Ava Reid, author of A Study in Drowning
‘This book has everything you could possibly want this fall . . . a cursed town, a haunted house, a vivid & eerie setting‘ – Reese Witherspoon
**A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick**
Starling House was a No. 6 Sunday Times bestseller w/c 18/11/2023
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Orphans Opal and younger brother Jasper live in a manky motel room in a poverty-stricken Kentucky mining town: “Bad luck slinks behind us like a mean dog nipping at our heels,” she notes. But their lives change when Opal gets a cleaning job at the local haunted house, employed by its troubled owner Arthur. This is, in a part, a reworking of Beauty and The Beast and unexpectedly funny in places, with Opal’s morose humour tempering the bleak history of the house and the plot’s supernatural elements. Harrow’s writing is deliciously evocative—you can almost smell the “rotting labyrinth” of Starling House from here.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hugo Award winner Harrow (The Ten Thousand Doors of January) does it again in this tender and triumphant haunted house story. The closest thing to a home that Opal has ever known is the motel room where she lives with her younger brother, Jasper, but she's plagued by mysterious dreams about wandering through Starling House, the most notorious building in the coal-mining town of Eden, Ky., complete with perpetually slamming doors and a light that cuts through the town's thick, rising mist. None of the townsfolk have ever seen the inside save for the unsettling and reclusive Starling family, but in Opal's dreams she knows the interior intimately. She feels called to investigate her connection to the house and the family, but along the way she'll have to determine which secrets she's ready to uncover and who and what she's willing to fight for. Harrow's prose cuts straight to the heart as she melds a story of family legacy and historical oppression with a stirring call to speak the truth. Readers will be left chewing on this tale long after the last page, and Starling House will no doubt take its place alongside fiction's most memorable haunted houses. Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly described the protagonist as a teenager.
