We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood lives at the edge of a village with her gentle older sister Constance and their ailing uncle Julian, the three of them the only survivors of a poisoning that killed the rest of the family six years earlier. The villagers loathe and fear them; Merricat keeps the world at bay with private rituals and buried talismans. Their fragile, closed-off life holds until a cousin arrives with designs on the family fortune, and the careful order Merricat has built begins to crack.

Shirley Jackson's final novel is a small masterpiece of gothic unease — funny, sinister, and tender by turns — narrated by one of literature's most unforgettable and unreliable voices.