The House of the Seven Gables (Bantam Classics)

In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family’s salvation—or its downfall.Hawthorne called The House of the Seven Gables “a Romance,” and freely bestowed upon it many fascinating gothic touches. A brilliant intertwining of the popular, the symbolic, and the historical, the novel is a powerful exploration of personal and national guilt, a work that Henry James declared “the closest approach we are likely to have to the Great American Novel.”

Henry James From the Trade Paperback edition.

"A large and generous production, pervaded with that vague hum, that indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man, which is the real sign of a great work of fiction."

From the Back Cover

A New England family struggles under the weight of their haunted past. The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, follows the mentally and emotionally unstable Pyncheon clan. Their ancestral home is the source of many strange happenings due to its controversial history rooted in witchcraft, deception and death.

About the Author

Adam Sims, Earphones Award-winning narrator, is an actor who trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His recordings for radio include Wenny Has Wings, The World According to Humphrey, and The Salamander Letter, all for the BBC. Film and theater credits include Band of Brothers on HBO; Lost in Space and The Madness of George III at the West Yorkshire Playhouse; Alice in Wonderland with the Royal Shakespeare Company; A Midsummer Night's Dream at Regent's Park; and Snake in Fridge at the Royal Exchange Theatre, for which he won the award for Best Actor at the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards.Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is considered to be one of the greatest American authors of the nineteenth century. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he used Puritan New England as a setting for many of his short stories, allegorical tales, and novels. The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's masterpiece, has never been out of print since it was first published in 1850.

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