The House of Whispers by Anna Mazzola: A gorgeous slice of gothic fiction – book review –

But for talented young pianist Eva Valenti, love is in the air as she falls for the urbane and handsome widower father of one of her pupils. The problem for Eva is that she has a secret, and sometimes secrets from the past are more perilous than a world that is teetering on the brink of war.

Anna Mazzola, author of the award-winning debut novel The Unseeing, and the highly acclaimed The Clockwork Girl, returns to thrill and chill us with The House of Whispers, a dark and gripping tale full of the gothic vibes that have become the hallmarks of this exciting and imaginative writer.

Sweeping readers into the dark atmospherics of fascist leader Il Duce’s pre-war cauldron of authoritarianism, brutality and oppression, The House of Whispers blends history, mystery and spine-tingling frissons of the paranormal into a masterpiece of menace and manipulation.

Classically trained pianist Eva Valenti might appear to be an ‘all-Italian girl’ but born Iva Valentich to Slovene parents in Trieste, she can still remember when she was seven and heard the jeers of the mob on the day men in black shirts came to drive the Slovenes out of the city.

After her parents died, Eva decided to ‘make myself afresh’ and now has a new life in Rome, working as a music teacher since she left college and finding friendship with fellow students Mirella and Ettore. But there is an unwelcome cloud over the sparkling, sunlit May of 1938 as black swastikas ‘crawling over the walls’ herald a visit by the feared German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

By July, the mood in Rome has darkened yet more and it’s a nervous time for the three ‘outsider’ friends as Eva has an unspoken history, Mirella is Jewish and Ettore is gay. Mirella refuses to deny her Jewish religion and flees to France, while Ettore is determined to stay and fight the fascists.

With some unease, Eva decides it will be easier to ‘live a decent life’ if she stays but knows she must appear to be ‘faultlessly, unassailably Italian.’ And then she meets the recently widowed lawyer Dante Cavallera, the father of her new and troubled 16-year-old pupil Chiara, and is immediately struck by his immaculate home on the Via Giulia with its ‘peculiar energy’ and intoxicated by his good looks and confident manner.

Love blossoms and Eva is drawn into marriage with Dante but on the outside, the forces of fascism are accelerating and in her new home, Eva fears that something else is at work. The gap left by Dante’s glamorous wife Adelina overshadows her life, she hears whispering in the walls, and what are the mysterious, claw-like gashes that appear on Chiara’s arm?

Soon Eva starts to wonder whether the house itself is trying to give up the secrets of its mysterious past... secrets that Dante seems determined to keep hidden. And all the while, Eva must also conceal the truth of her own identity because if she is discovered, she will be in greater danger than she could ever have imagined.

A series of unnatural events, the haunting, idealised ‘perfection’ of Dante’s dead wife, and the long shadow and sense of inadequacy that it casts over the naïve and unknowing Eva, vibrate with the same eerie power of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.

When her Jewish friend Mirella makes her bid to escape, and the equally threatened Ettore decides to stay in Italy and fight the enemy, Eva faces the doubts and guilt of denying her true heritage but then places her trust in her Italian husband to save her.

But as hatred and prejudice grow, and the fascists start to wreak political mayhem and roll out their social projects which see beggars cleared from the streets, the removal of anything deemed unsightly, and listening ears on every street corner, so the hauntings and horrors in Dante’s pristine home start to take their toll on the family.

And as secrets of every kind start to tumble out of the closet, the nail-biting tension ratchets up, the past unravels, and dangerous truths, which had lain hidden for years, precipitate some shocking consequences.

Written with Mazzola’s rich period detail, a firm grasp of this febrile period of Italian history, and her deliciously emotive, atmospheric and unsettling brand of storytelling, The House of Whispers is another gorgeous slice of gothic fiction.

(Orion, paperback, £8.99)