Description

A taut, uncanny sci-fi thriller where AI meets The Haunting of Hill House, from Arkady Martine, Hugo Award-winning author of A Memory Called Empire.

‘Exquisitely creepy’ – Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo Award-winning author of the Children of Time series

‘I’m a piece of architecture, Detective. How should I know how humans are like to die?’

Architect Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted to begin with.

A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing; a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. But now Deniau’s been dead a year, and his masterpiece, Rose House, is locked up tight.

Dr Selene Gisil, a former protege, is the sole person permitted, once a year, to enter Rose House. But now, there is a dead person inside. It is not Deniau, and Rose House refuses to speak.

Dr Gisil can enter, but she wasn’t there when Rose House called in the death. Yet someone was. Someone died.

And someone, or something, may be there still . . .

‘A sharp, clever blend of science fictional gothic and crime’ – The Guardian

Publisher Review

An exquisitely creepy exploration of the boundaries of life, death, the real and the artificial — Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo Award-winning author of the Children of Time series A sharp, clever blend of science fictional gothic and crime — The Guardian Martine’s soaring, crystalline prose evokes Shirley Jackson’s Hill House if designed by Frank Gehry. She builds a twisted cathedral of story and fills every inch with equal parts beauty and a creeping, inescapable sense of wrongness. Readers will be floored — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review Tight and unsettling . . . a story that’s stylish, discomforting and strangely believable . . . Rose/House is a freaky love letter to architecture, weird and otherwise — Jake Casella Brookins * Locus * [The Haunting of Hill House is] a hard act to riff on without simply producing a lesser version, and yet Rose/House manages it dramatically and delightfully — Reactor While a mystery story raises questions in order to answer them and reset order in a disordered world, Rose/House deconstructs that process and reassembles the pieces into something other – or perhaps Other. The spirit that haunts this story is not that of the locked-room puzzle but something stranger and not at all reassuring — Russell Letson * Locus * All-round brilliant space opera, I absolutely loved it — Ann Leckie, author of Translation State on A Memory Called Empire