Even now I can remember the first time I saw the house as clearly as if there were a video of it playing in my head. After the suicide of his uncle, a successful art dealer, Lucas Heathfield inherits Stoneborough Manor in Oxfordshire. He imagines it as a place where he and his tight-knit group of friends can spend time away from London. From the beginning, the house changes everything. Soon after their first visit on New Year's Eve, Lucas risks their close friendship to declare his love for Joanna. Everyone is delighted - they have been expecting them to get together for years. But Joanna soon senses that the house is having a strange effect on Lucas. He becomes haunted by the death of his uncle and obsessed by cine films of his uncle's friends at Stoneborough thirty years earlier. The group is disturbingly similar to their own and the films gradually reveal things about Lucas's family that he has never known before. Within the claustrophobic confines of the house over a hot, decadent summer, secrets slide out of the past and sexual tensions escalate, shattering the group's friendship and changing all their lives irrevocably. A story of compulsion, desire, darkness and betrayal, The House At Midnight is a coming-of-age story for our time with a breathtaking and shocking climax.

'Atmospheric and compelling - an impressive debut' Joanna Briscoe 'Lucie Whitehouse's debut novel is about friends from Oxford who meet regularly for weekends at a large country house. Not unexpectedly, those who have read the novel are drawing comparisons with 'The Big Chill' and 'The Secret History'.' The Bookseller 'Psychological suspense as elegant as a Swiss watch but as powerful as a locomotive ... subtle, intelligent, accessible, and highly recommended' LEE CHILD 'Gripping and tense with an atmosphere which holds you in thrall' Susan Hill

Lucie Whitehouse was born in Warkwickshire in 1975, read Classics at Oxford University and now lives in London. The House at Midnight is her first novel.