The House on Berkeley Square Some houses are built to shelter us. Others are simply waiting to be fed. Sarah Atherton has spent her career restoring the past while watching her own ambitions slowly wither. A talented London architect and specialist in listed properties, she is trapped in a successful practice that offers security —and work that leaves her increasingly empty. So Sarah walks away. Determined to build a career on her own terms, she lands the commission she has dreamed about for years: the complete restoration of a magnificent Georgian house on Berkeley Square. It should be the making of her. Instead, it begins to consume her. From the moment Sarah crosses its threshold, the house exerts a strange fascination. Beneath the dust, decay and faded grandeur, she senses something extraordinary waiting to be uncovered. As the restoration progresses, fascination becomes obsession. Sarah spends longer hours inside the house. She stops sleeping. Stops listening. Stops noticing how much of herself she is surrendering to it. But David notices. A chef accustomed to appetites of a very different kind, Sarah’s boyfriend watches helplessly as the woman he loves slips further from his reach. At first, he blames the pressures of her new business. Then jealousy. But soon David begins to suspect something far more disturbing. The house doesn’t simply want to be restored. It wants Sarah. Can David pull Sarah from its grasp before she disappears completely? Or has the house already decided that she belongs to it? A Gothic tale of obsession, ambition and insatiable hunger, The House on Berkeley Square asks a chilling question: when you give your heart to a house, what happens when the house wants the rest of you too?
