Author(s): Shirley Jackson

Fiction | Staff Favourites | Bestsellers

Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret   Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.   For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

STAFF REVIEW by Fantine

The Blackwood family  have clung to their wealth and status for generations, isolating and ostracising themselves. They aren't just hated, they are feared; although acquitted everyone knows their eldest daughter Constance slipped arsenic in the sugar, killing almost the entire Blackwood family.

Unnerving foreboding builds as we learn more about the family and understand the lengths the youngest daughter Merricat will go to in order to keep her and her beloved sister’s world perfect and protected.

Disturbing, tense, haunting - this is one of the best crafted novels i’ve read, all about abjection and the othering nature of family systems, with one of the most interesting protagonists. 

I <3 you Shirley Jackson…