‘A haunted house fable for the housing crisis generation . . . Part satire, part psychological interrogation, part straight-up haunted-house story, The Upstairs Room is intriguing and compelling.’
The TLS
Read moreRobert Williams, author of Into the Trees
‘Kate Murray-Browne is a wonderful writer and The Upstairs Room is a brilliantly evoked, sure-footed debut about loneliness, illness, housing, jealousy, failure and love — not to mention a terrifying room’
Robert Williams, author of Into the Trees
Read moreIrish Times
‘In her realistic, multifaceted fiction centred on precarious relationships she has more in common with writers like David Nicholls and Laura Barnett than the ghost story genre that frames her narrative . . . What makes The Upstairs Room so compelling are the characters’ interior lives’
The Irish Times
Read moreSunday Times
‘A chilling tale of just how badly wrong life can go when you mortgage yourself to the hilt’
Sunday Times
Read moreAnna Smaill, author of The Chimes
‘A brilliantly observed and utterly unnerving ghost story of contemporary feminism and the housing crisis. Murray-Browne turns the screws so cleverly that the moment you long to break the novel’s breathless grip is also the moment you recognise that its world is actually your own.’
Anna Smaill, author of The Chimes
Read moreRed
‘A superbly tense and atmospheric novel about make-do-and-mend relationships and how we are where we live’
Red
Read moreScotsman
‘Murray-Browne skilfully weaves together scenes of family life with eerie vignettes . . . a sharply observed domestic drama . . . a compelling read . . . to be gobbled up feverishly’
Scotsman
Read moreEmerald Street
‘The Upstairs Room is a horror story for our times . . . Kate Murray-Browne takes the everyday horror of our over-priced, over-crowded city lives and turns up the fear’
Emerald Street
Read moreKate Saunders, The Times
‘Ghosts? Lurking sense of evil? You may find them here but the truly creepy element in this superbly unsettling first novel is only too real — property. Kate Murray-Browne has stuck her pen directly into the throbbing vein of the modern middle-class nightmare . . . Forget everything you thought you knew about spooky little girls in fiction; Murray-Browne uses the clichés to confound the reader’s expectations, and it’s utterly compelling’
Kate Saunders, The Times
Read moreDavid Sexton, Evening Standard
‘The Upstairs Room is compulsively readable without being at all melodramatic or cheaply noir. Murray-Browne commands a lucid and reasonable prose, just the way to conduct you unprotestingly into this deranging subject matter . . . Such cool writing looks easy. It’s not. Murray-Browne is an expert editor and it shows’
David Sexton, Evening Standard
Read moreLottie Moggach, author of Kiss Me First
‘I loved this novel. It’s suspenseful and creepy and confidently paced, and psychologically and socially acute, and really gets under the skin of the gentrifying city’
Lottie Moggach, author of Kiss Me First
Read moreJulie Burchill, Spectator, Books of the Year
‘The best dose of my drug of choice, the psychological thriller, was Kate Murray-Browne’s The Upstairs Room. With thrillers as well written as this, who needs “literary” novels?’
Julie Burchill, Spectator, Books of the Year
Read moreJohn Carey
‘A gripping and impressive story of mounting terror. Spellbinding’
John Carey, author of The Unexpected Professor
Read moreMichael Frayn, author of Spies
‘A very impressive debut . . . a strikingly unusual, unsettling narrative that makes you want to read on to the end’
Michael Frayn, author of Spies
Read more