Slade House

Description

Turn down Slade Alley - narrow, dank and easy to miss, even when you're looking for it. Find the small black iron door set into the right-hand wall. No handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it swings open. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't quite make sense; too grand for the shabby neighbourhood, too large for the space it occupies. A stranger greets you and invites you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. This unnerving, taut and intricately woven tale by one of our most original and bewitching writers begins in 1979 and comes to its turbulent conclusion around Hallowe'en, 2015. Because every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, a 'guest' is summoned to Slade House. But why has that person been chosen, by whom and for what purpose? The answers lie waiting in the long attic, at the top of the stairs . . .

David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks. He has won the John Llewellyn Rhys, Geoffrey Faber Memorial and South Bank Show Literature Prizes, and been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize. In 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

Painstakingly imagined and crackling with narrative velocity, it's a Dracula for the new millennium, a "Hansel and Gretel" for grownups, a reminder of how much fun fiction can be. All the intelligence and linguistic dazzle of a David Mitchell novel, but this one will also creep the pants off you . . . you won't be able to put this book down. An eerie haunted-house tale . . . a spellbinding chiller about an unnatural greed for life and the arrogance of power. Sharp, fast, flat-out spooky . . . a hypnotic read Mitchell has long been acknowledged as one of the finest - if not the finest - literary minds of his generation; but he's also one of the most suspenseful . . . I read in a constant state of terror and joy and could not turn the pages fast enough. Fans of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas will recognize the interlocking narrative structure and literary-fantastical bent . . . who doesn't want to just drink up all of Mitchell's writing? - Library Journal