Starling House
A Sunday Times bestseller and the perfect dark Gothic fairytale
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- €10.99
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick
‘Alix E. Harrow is an exceptional, undeniable talent’ - Olivie Blake, author of The Atlas Six
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.
No one in Eden remembers when Starling House was built. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the house – and its last, lonely heir – go to rot. Starling House is uncanny and ugly and fully of secrets, just like its heir. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but it might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. It feels dangerously like something she’s never had: a home.
But Opal isn’t the only one interested in the house, or the horrors and wonders that lie beneath it. If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it. She’ll have to dig up her family’s ugly history and let herself dream of a better future. She’ll have to go down, down into Underland, and claw her way back to the light . . .
This is a romantic and spellbinding Gothic fairytale from Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-shortlisted Alix E. Harrow.
'Starling House is Alix E. Harrow’s greatest work yet' - Ava Reid, author of A Study in Drowning
‘Gorgeous, poignant, and honest – an unforgettable read’ - Andrea Stewart, author of The Bone Shard Daughter
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.
