Hardback cover
Paperback cover
The Upstairs Room (2017)
‘the real thing – frightening, clever and full of atmosphere.’
Susan Hill
A Times and Spectator Book of the Year
Eleanor and Richard have stretched themselves to the limit to buy the perfect home. But the cracks are already starting to show. Eleanor is unnerved by the eerie atmosphere in the house and is convinced it is making her ill. Their two young daughters are restless and unsettled. Richard, on the other hand, is more preoccupied with Zoe, their alluring young lodger, who is also struggling to feel at home.
As Eleanor’s symptoms intensify, she becomes determined to unravel the mystery of the family who lived in the house before them. Who were the Ashworths, and why is the name ‘Emily’ written hundreds of times on the walls of the upstairs room?
‘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
Praise for The Upstairs Room:
[scroll to the right for more]
‘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
‘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
‘A chilling tale of just how badly wrong life can go when you mortgage yourself to the hilt’
Sunday Times
‘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
‘A superbly tense and atmospheric novel about make-do-and-mend relationships and how we are where we live’
Red
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘A gripping and impressive story of mounting terror. Spellbinding’
John Carey, author of The Unexpected Professor
‘A very impressive debut . . . a strikingly unusual, unsettling narrative that makes you want to read on to the end’
Michael Frayn, author of Spies
‘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