The House at Midnight: A Novel Book

From a promising young author, a gripping psychological debut novel in the tradition of The Secret History and The Big Chill.

After the suicide of his uncle, Lucas Heathfield inherits Stoneborough Manor in Oxfordshire. His best friend Joanna imagines it as a place where their tight-knit group of friends can escape London and rekindle the revelry of their college days. But from the beginning, the house has a strange effect on everyone who stays there. Much to Joanna's surprise, she embarks on a romantic relationship with Lucas, who has loved her for many years, and watches as he becomes haunted by the death of his uncle and obsessed by the house's past, a past that hints at disturbing parallels between the generations who have inhabited it.

Meanwhile Lucas's other close friend, Danny, sees the house as an opportunity. In spite of Joanna's objections, he moves in and sets about using Lucas's new wealth to his own advantage. But the longer the pair spends at...

Publishers Weekly

At 30, Londoner Joanna still spends her free time with her Oxford college friends, now with burgeoning careers and all on the cusp of real adulthood. Lucas, Joanna's closest friend and prolonged crush, inherits Stoneborough Manor, a huge and imposing house in the Cotswold countryside filled with priceless art, where all the college friends are to spend every weekend together. The first visit, on New Year's Eve, doesn't start well, as the Londoners get lost. To Joanna, the manor has a threatening and unsettling aura, and indeed, the big, dark, vaguely confusing house with its secrets and disappointments works well as an allegory for moving into the responsibilities and fears of growing up. Joanna and her friends proceed to deal with the unknown, some well, others destructively. A focus on the shifting relationships and loyalties doesn't leave much room for plot, but Joanna's voice is engaging, and Londoner Whitehouse, making her debut, manages to generate a lot of interest in the somewhat flat Four Weddings and a Funeral-esque ensemble: she gets the insecurities, pedigrees and Cotswold locale spot on. Unfortunately, this promising first effort features a truncated ending that is less evocative than jarring. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.