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THE INVITED

Jennifer McMahon

A chilling ghost story with a twist: the New York Times bestselling author of The Winter People returns to the woods of Vermont to tell the story of a husband and wife who don’t simply move into a haunted house, they start building one from scratch, without knowing it, until it’s too late...

In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate abandon the comforts of suburbia and teaching jobs to take up residence on forty-four acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. When they discover that this charming property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago. As Helen starts carefully sourcing decorative building materials for her home—wooden beams, mantles, historic bricks—she starts to unearth, and literally conjure, the tragic lives of Hattie’s descendants, three generations of “Breckenridge women,” each of whom died amid suspicion, and who seem to still be seeking something precious and elusive in the present day.


Rights to The Winter People were sold in Brazil: Record; Czech Republic: Dobrovsky; Finland: Bazar; France: Laffont; Germany: Ullstein; Indonesia: Mizan; Norway: Bazar; Poland: Media Rodzina; Russia: Exmo; Sweden: Bazar; Turkey: Ephesus Yayinlari.

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Published 2019-04-30 by Doubleday

Comments

“…McMahon’s siren-like ghosts use Helen to build their own home to haunt, and the resulting blend of ghost story and modern mystery is flawlessly compelling and evocative. A masterful twist on the haunted-house story.”

“THE INVITED deserves a special spot in the canon of great ghost stories, and will remind McMahon’s readers why she is such a worthy literary descendant of Shirley Jackson.” – Chris Bohjalian, bestselling author of The Flight Attendant