A Good House for Children

The dazzling debut novel from Kate Collins--a feminist gothic mystery spanning decades, in the vein of Mexican Gothic and The Essex Serpent. "Has a little bit of all things not very nice that make up a page-turning popular novel, without resorting to moral simplicity or predictability...more than once, I was put in mind of The Turn of the Screw." -- Irish Times Once upon a time Orla was: a woman, a painter, a lover. Now she is a mother and a wife, and when her husband Nick suggests that their city apartment has grown too small for their lives, she agrees, in part because she does agree, and in part because she is too tired to think about what she really does want. She agrees again when Nick announces with pride that he has found an antiquated Georgian house on the Dorset cliffs--a good house for children, he says, tons of space and gorgeous grounds. But as the family settles into the mansion--Nick absent all week, commuting to the city for work--Orla finds herself unsettled. She hears