Description

A taut, uncanny sci-fi novella from Arkady Martine, Hugo Award-winning author of A Memory Called Empire.

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

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 Rose House is locked up tight, as commanded by the architect’s will.

Dr. Selene Gisil, a former protege, is the sole person permitted to come into Rose House once a year. Now, there is a dead person in Rose House. It is not Basit Deniau, and it is not Dr. Gisil. It is someone else. But Rose House won’t communicate any further.

No one can get inside Rose House, except Dr. Gisil. Dr. Gisil was not in North America when Rose House called in the death. But someone did. And someone died there.

And someone may be there still.

‘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

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 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 [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 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 * 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 * A cutting, beautiful, human adventure . . . The best SF novel I’ve read in the last five years — Yoon Ha Lee, author of Ninefox Gambit on A Memory Called Empire All-round brilliant space opera, I absolutely loved it — Ann Leckie, author of Translation State on A Memory Called Empire This complex, stunning space opera promises to reshape the genre — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review on A Desolation of Peace This is first-class space opera — The Guardian on A Desolation of Peace