This House Will Feed

Masterfully blending well-researched history with Irish folk horror, Tureaud’s striking adult debut (after the YA novel The Last Hope in Hopetown) is the haunting tale of a young woman’s experience of Ireland’s Great Hunger. In 1848, Maggie O’Shaughnessy struggles to adjust to life in the workhouse after losing her entire family to famine-related deaths. Enter the eccentric aristocrat Lady Catherine, who needs a young woman of the appropriate age and appearance to pose as her late daughter to protect her inheritance from her husband from passing to another. Maggie agrees in exchange for the promise of food, housing, and financial security. Upon arriving at Lady Catherine’s estate, however, Maggie hears whispers that the house is haunted and that its mistress is somehow caught up in its evils. Complicating things further are the repressed memories that start to resurface in Maggie’s mind. The picture Tureaud paints of the Great Hunger is devastating, complete with chapter-heading epigraphs sourced from historical records that often highlight British complicity in the famine. The politics prove just as harrowing as the haunting as Tureaud dives deep into Irish/Anglo tensions. Both horror and historical fiction fans will be impressed. (Jan.)