The Hothouse By The East River
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
What happens when the dead refuse to stay dead, and the living refuse to acknowledge they are not? The Hothouse by the East River is a razor-sharp, darkly comic novel set in the sweltering heat of 1970s New York City, where a wealthy British couple, Paul and Elsa, inhabit a luxurious apartment alongside their grown children and a cast of increasingly sinister acquaintances — all of whom may be something far more unsettling than they appear. Elsa's shadow falls in the wrong direction, a detail that haunts the narrative and signals to the reader that the reality of this glittering, suffocating world is fundamentally, irreversibly fractured. Muriel Spark, one of the twentieth century's most precise and subversive literary voices, constructs a narrative that is simultaneously a ghost story, a psychological thriller, and a searing meditation on memory, guilt, and the nature of existence itself. Written with her characteristic wit and chilling economy of language, the novel draws on wartime trauma, blurring the line between the past and the present until neither can be trusted. Spark's brilliance lies in her ability to make the supernatural feel inevitable — leaving the reader to question not just what is real within the story, but what reality itself truly means.
Author: Muriel Spark
Format: Hardback
Published: 1973, Macmillan
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
What happens when the dead refuse to stay dead, and the living refuse to acknowledge they are not? The Hothouse by the East River is a razor-sharp, darkly comic novel set in the sweltering heat of 1970s New York City, where a wealthy British couple, Paul and Elsa, inhabit a luxurious apartment alongside their grown children and a cast of increasingly sinister acquaintances — all of whom may be something far more unsettling than they appear. Elsa's shadow falls in the wrong direction, a detail that haunts the narrative and signals to the reader that the reality of this glittering, suffocating world is fundamentally, irreversibly fractured. Muriel Spark, one of the twentieth century's most precise and subversive literary voices, constructs a narrative that is simultaneously a ghost story, a psychological thriller, and a searing meditation on memory, guilt, and the nature of existence itself. Written with her characteristic wit and chilling economy of language, the novel draws on wartime trauma, blurring the line between the past and the present until neither can be trusted. Spark's brilliance lies in her ability to make the supernatural feel inevitable — leaving the reader to question not just what is real within the story, but what reality itself truly means.