Slade House

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas

Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door.

Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House: a surreal place where visitors see what they want to see, including some things that should be impossible. Every nine years, the house’s residents—an odd brother and sister—extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late. . . .

Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story—as only David Mitchell could imagine it.

Advance praise for Slade House

“David Mitchell doesn’t break rules so much as he proves them to be inhibitors to lively intelligent fiction.Slade House is a fractal offshoot crystallizing from his remarkable The Bone Clocks, an eerie haunted-house tale that takes as much from quantum mechanics as from traditional supernatural lore, a spellbinding chiller about an unnatural greed for life and the arrogance of power.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz

“What can’t David Mitchell do? Slade House is a page-burning, read-in-one-sitting, at times terrifying novel that does for the haunted house story what Henry James did for the ghost story inThe Turn of the Screw. It has all the intelligence and linguistic dazzle of a David Mitchell novel, but this one will also creep the pants off you. Just as Slade House won’t let go of its unsuspecting guests, you won’t be able to put this book down. Welcome to Slade House—step inside.”—Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author ofFortune Smiles and The Orphan Master’s Son

“Fans of [David] Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas will recognize the interlocking narrative structure and literary-fantastical bent of this new work. . . . Pitched as his most accessible book yet, but, really, who doesn’t want to just drink up all of Mitchell’s writing?”—Library Journal

Praise for David Mitchell

“Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A genre-bending, time-leaping, world-traveling, puzzle-making, literary magician.”—Esquire

“One of the most electric writers alive.”—The Boston Globe


From the Hardcover edition.

DAVID MITCHELL is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Bone Clocks,The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas,Number9Dream and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world byTIME magazine in 2007 ("The most consistently interesting novelist of his generation,"TIME). With KA Yoshida, Mitchell co-translated from the Japanese the international bestselling memoir,The Reason I Jump. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.