Red House

Family; that slippery word; a star to every wandering bark; and everyone sailing under a different sky. After his mother's death; Richard; a newly remarried hospital consultant; decides to build bridges with his estranged sister; inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children; a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals; log fires; card games and wet walks. But in the quiet and stillness of the valley; ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends; enemies; victims; saviours. And watching over all of them from high on the dark hill; Karen; Angela's stillborn daughter. "The Red House" is about the extraordinariness of the ordinary; weaving the words and thoughts of the eight characters together with those fainter; stranger voices - of books and letters and music; of the dead who once inhabited these rooms; of the ageing house itself and the landscape in which it sits. Once again Mark Haddon; bestselling author of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" and "A Spot of Bother" has written a novel that is funny; poignant and deeply insightful about human lives.