Catherine House

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What to expect

A dark, claustrophobic and compulsive novel, in the vein of THE WATER CURE, NEVER LET ME GO and Ottessa Moshfegh.

That was the Catherine experiment: give the house three years - three profound, total years - then become anything or anyone you want to be. Watch all your dreams come true

Catherine House is an American college with a difference. Only the most brilliant minds enter, and its graduates earn prestige, wealth and honour. But over the three years they attend the school, they remain within its black gates; they have no contact with their loved ones; no association with the outside world. Those who break these rules will find themselves facing time in the school's infamous tower.

Ines enters Catherine House on the run from an incredibly dark secret, and welcomes the school's isolation. Sharing a room with the sweet, damaged Baby, she slowly begins to build the group of friends she never had outside its walls. One day, however, Baby is summoned to the tower - and never returns. Ines is heartbroken, left to uncover the secrets that Catherine House conceals while slowly becoming more and more seduced herself by its dark, magnetic power.

Swirling with atmosphere and the subtle tingling of horror, CATHERINE HOUSE is a novel that will steal your heart and swallow you whole.

(P) 2020 HarperCollins, Inc.

Critics Review

A delicious, diverse, genre-bending gothic, as smart as it is spooky
Chloe Benjamin
Catherine House is a deliciously sinister novel that bristles with an unsettling glamour. It's almost impossible not to be seduced by Elisabeth Thomas's beautiful writing and the intoxicating world she has created
Louise O'Neill
[A] delicious literary gothic debut
New York Times
Echoes of Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go contribute an intriguing undercurrent to this unsettling gothic concoction
Daily Mail
This has to be one of the most gripping books I've read this year... The read feels claustrophobic, decadent, extreme and sad in equal measure, and I was amazed by the plot
Woman's Way
This suspenseful read is a terrific debut
Woman's Weekly
Gothic horror provides the architecture for an arrestingly strange melange of speculative fiction and teen trauma in this atmospheric debut novel . . . nibbling menace spurs the plot onwards
Observer
A brilliantly observed tale brimming with subtle malevolence. An atmospheric, hypnotic delight
Irenosen Okojie
Thomas's debut novel is a dark, delicious gothic read that hits all the right spots in the best way. If you want a book you can't put down for even a second, this is it
Forbes, 10 most anticipated books of 2020
Spellbinding... Surreal imagery, spare characterization, and artful, hypnotic prose lend Thomas's tale a delirious air, but at the book's core lies a profound portrait of depression and adolescent turmoil. Fans of Donna Tartt's The Secret History will devour this philosophical fever dream
Publisher's Weekly
Moody and evocative as a fever dream, CATHERINE HOUSE is the sort of book that wraps itself around your brain, drawing you closer with each hypnotic step
Washington Post
Catherine House is a haunting, atmospheric reflection on the discovery of self and others. At times terrifying, always gorgeously captivating, Thomas' debut is one not to be missed, and perhaps to be revisited frequently
Booklist

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