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For fans of Gillian Flynn and Tana French, a chilling story of a Northern Irish murder sixty years buried.
Sara Keane's husband, Damien, has uprooted them from England and moved them to his native Northern Ireland for a "fresh start" in the wake of her nervous breakdown. Sara, who knows no one in Northern Ireland, is jobless, carless, friendless—all but a prisoner in her own house. When a blood-soaked old woman beats on the door, insisting the house is hers before being bundled back to her care facility, Sara begins to understand the house has a terrible history her husband never intended for her to discover. As the two women form a bond over their shared traumas, Sara finds the strength to stand up to her abuser, and Mary—silent for six decades—is finally ready to tell her story...
Through the counterpoint voices—one modern Englishwoman, one Northern Irish farmgirl speaking from half a century earlier—Stuart Neville offers a chilling and gorgeous portrait of violence and resilience in this truly haunting narrative.
"[A] gut-wrenching novel of psychological suspense...This unforgettable tale of servitude and subservience, domestic abuse, and toxic masculinity builds to a resolution offering redemption and heartfelt solace. Neville has outdone himself." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[The House of Ashes] will keep you turning the pages." - Kirkus Reviews
"A stunning novel, brutal, disturbing and completely riveting...Life-endangering female resistance to misogyny is a recurrent theme in contemporary crime fiction, but The House of Ashes is one of the most vivid, moving and memorable treatments it has received." - Crime Culture
"Chilling, compassionate and compelling, Stuart Neville takes us straight to the dark heart of rural Ireland." - Val McDermid
"Stuart Neville writes crime fiction that is edgy, compelling and always deeply humane. This might well be his masterpiece." - Mark Billingham
This information about The House of Ashes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stuart Neville's debut novel, The Ghosts of Belfast (published in the UK as The Twelve), won the Mystery/Thriller category of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was picked as one of the top crime novels of 2009 by both the New York Times and the LA Times. He has been shortlisted for various awards, including the MWA Edgar, CWA Dagger, Theakstons Old Peculier Novel of the Year, Barry, Macavity, Dilys awards, as well as the Irish Book Awards Crime Novel of the Year.
He has since published nine more critically acclaimed books, two of which were under the pen name Haylen Beck. In 2020, Soho Press will publish his first short story collection, The Traveller and Other Stories.
Stuart's novels have been translated into various languages, including German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, ...
It was one of the worst speeches I ever heard ... when a simple apology was all that was required.
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