This House Will Feed
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
Amidst the devastation of Ireland’s Great Famine, a young woman is salvaged from certain death when offered a mysterious position at a remote manor house haunted by a strange power and the horror of her own memories in this chillingly evocative historical novel braided with gothic horror and supernatural suspense for readers of Katherine Arden’s The Warm Hands of Ghosts and The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins.
County Clare, 1848: In the scant few years since the potato blight first cast its foul shadow over Ireland, Maggie O’Shaughnessy has lost everything—her entire family and the man she trusted with her heart. Toiling in the Ennis Workhouse for paltry rations, she can see no future either within or outside its walls—until the mysterious Lady Catherine arrives to whisk her away to an old mansion in the stark limestone landscape of the Burren.
Lady Catherine wants Maggie to impersonate her late daughter, Wilhelmina, and hoodwink solicitors into releasing Wilhelmina’s widow pension so that Lady Catherine can continue to provide for the villagers in her care. In exchange, Maggie will receive freedom from the workhouse, land of her own, and the one thing she wants more than either: a chance to fulfill the promise she made to her brother on his deathbed—to live to spite them all.
Launching herself into the daunting task, Maggie plays the role of Wilhelmina as best she can while ignoring the villagers’ tales of ghostly figures and curses. But more worrying are the whispers that come from within. Something in Lady Catherine’s house is reawakening long-buried memories in Maggie—of a foe more terrifying than hunger or greed, of a power that calls for blood and vengeance, and of her own role in a nightmare that demands the darkest sacrifice . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Masterfully blending well-researched history with Irish folk horror, Tureaud's striking adult debut (after the YA novel The Last Hope in Hopetown) is the haunting tale of a young woman's experience of Ireland's Great Hunger. In 1848, Maggie O'Shaughnessy struggles to adjust to life in the workhouse after losing her entire family to famine-related deaths. Enter the eccentric aristocrat Lady Catherine, who needs a young woman of the appropriate age and appearance to pose as her late daughter to protect her inheritance from her husband from passing to another. Maggie agrees in exchange for the promise of food, housing, and financial security. Upon arriving at Lady Catherine's estate, however, Maggie hears whispers that the house is haunted and that its mistress is somehow caught up in its evils. Complicating things further are the repressed memories that start to resurface in Maggie's mind. The picture Tureaud paints of the Great Hunger is devastating, complete with chapter-heading epigraphs sourced from historical records that often highlight British complicity in the famine. The politics prove just as harrowing as the haunting as Tureaud dives deep into Irish/Anglo tensions. Both horror and historical fiction fans will be impressed.
