The Hospitality

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

They come to dinner. They have come to dinner for three hundred years.


The Lambert family has hosted Edmund and Hester Harrison every Saturday evening for twenty-six years. Candles at seven, the roast at quarter past. In twenty-six years no Saturday has been missed. The guests are never late. Yet no one in the house can say what the Harrisons actually look like — not Robert, not his wife Ruth, who lays the table now with hands that no longer feel quite like her own.


When Samuel Lambert comes home after three years away, he expects the house exactly as he left it: the strained quiet, the flawless Saturday. He does not expect the hole in his own memory — a lifetime of these dinners, and not a single guest he can call to mind. Behind one door in the east wing, a lock with no key he has ever held. At the table, a sixth place laid for no one. And in his father's study, the family ledger, every Saturday entered in the same red ink since 1693, the year an Edmund Lambert bought this land and built the house on it.


The closer Samuel looks, the more wrong the house becomes. His mother is unravelling under a courtesy she has carried alone for decades. His father made a choice, long ago, not to know what he was part of. And the guests, who have been polite for three hundred years, have stopped being willing to wait.


This debt was passed down with the silver and the name. The appetite behind it was never the kind that ends. And the house has been keeping its side of the bargain for longer than anyone now alive can remember.


A literary gothic horror novella about courtesy as a form of complicity, and about the things we feed to the people we invite in. For readers of Shirley Jackson, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Sarah Waters.


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