The House of Whispers
A Novel
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A gothic tale set in a rambling house by the sea in which a maid cares for a mute old woman with a mysterious past, alongside her superstitious staff--from the author of The Silent Companions.
A perfect spooky read!
Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft's family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken. But Dr. Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the disease in the caves beneath his new Cornish home. While he devotes himself to his controversial medical trials, Louise finds herself increasingly discomfited by the strange tales her new maid tells of the fairies that hunt the land, searching for those they can steal away to their realm.
Forty years later, Hester arrives at Morvoren House to take up a position as nurse to the now partially paralyzed and mute Miss Pinecroft. Hester has fled to Cornwall to try to escape her past, but surrounded by superstitious staff enacting bizarre rituals, she soon discovers her new home may be just as dangerous as her last.
Laura Purcell's THE SHAPE OF DARKNESS is now out from Penguin!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Purcell (The Poison Thread) tantalizes with a skillful juxtaposition of nascent science and entrenched folk belief in this brooding period gothic. In the early 19th century, a maid going by the alias Hester Why has fled her employ in London under an unexplained dark cloud to serve as nursemaid to elderly spinster Louise Pinecroft, owner of Morvoren House on the remote Cornish coast. Hester soon discovers that the members of Louise's household believe fairy changelings have a foothold among Morvoren's personnel. That superstition, as it develops, channels directly back to Louise's work with her physician father 40 years earlier, and his efforts to cure tubercular patients with primitive medicine in the region's fairy-haunted caves. Its grave impact on Dr. Pinecroft's confidence as a man of reason and the doubts it raises in him about his efficacy as a physician set the stage for the dramas that have festered into the novel's present, and mirror the dangerous conditions Hester fled in London. Purcell paints a colorful portrait of her tale's distant time and place and immerses the reader in an era when superstition was a tenacious thread in the social fabric that bound its people. Her tale of secret guilt and atoning for it through ancient customs will please fans of classic gothic melodrama.
