The Boy at the Keyhole: A Novel

Authors: Giles, Stephen
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
BISAC/Subject: FIC022030, FIC030000, FIC019000
ISBN: 9781488098611, Related ISBNs: 1335652922, 1488098611, 9781335652928, 9781488098611
Classification: Fiction
Number of pages: 288,
Audience: General/trade
Synopsis: “You’ll talk about this book with everyone you meet. It’s that exciting.”—Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box

For fans of Shirley Jackson, Sarah Waters and Daphne du Maurier, an electrifying debut about a boy left alone in his family’s English estate with a housekeeper he suspects has murdered his mother


Nine-year-old Samuel lives alone in a once-great estate in Surrey with the family’s housekeeper, Ruth. His father is dead and his mother has been abroad for months, purportedly tending to her late husband’s faltering business. She left in a hurry one night while Samuel was sleeping and did not say goodbye.

Beyond her sporadic postcards, Samuel hears nothing from his mother. He misses her dearly and maps her journey in an atlas he finds in her study. Samuel’s life is otherwise regulated by Ruth, who runs the house with an iron fist. Only she and Samuel know how brutally she enforces order.

As rumors in town begin to swirl, Samuel wonders whether something more sinister is afoot. Perhaps his mother did not leave but was murdered—by Ruth.

Artful, haunting and hurtling toward a psychological showdown, The Boy at the Keyhole is an incandescent debut about the precarious dance between truth and perception, and the shocking acts that occur behind closed doors.
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