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The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw
Nov 6, 2025 11:20 PM

Author:Henry James,Tuppence Middleton,David Bromwich

The Turn of the Screw

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Tuppence Middleton, star of Sense8, also known for her role in Downton Abbey. This definitive recording is edited by, and includes an Introduction by David Bromwich.

In what Henry James called a 'trap for the unwary', The Turn of the Screw tells of a nameless young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. But is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence or something else entirely? The Turn of the Screw is James's great masterpiece of haunting atmosphere and unbearable tension and has influenced subsequent ghost stories and films such as The Innocents, starring Deborah Kerr, and The Others, starring Nicole Kidman.

Henry James (1843-1916) son of a prominent theologian, and brother to the philosopher William James, was one of the most celebrated novelists of the fin-de-siècle. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, biography and autobiography, and much travel writing, he wrote some twenty novels. His novella Daisy Miller (1878) established him as a literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic, and his other novels in Penguin Classics include Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904).

'A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale'

Oscar Wilde

Reviews

Sarah Schulman is a brilliant visionary, and this is a book of resistance and love, as urgently necessary now as it was thirty years ago

—— Olivia Laing

A scathing and darkly hilarious apocalypse-now

—— The Nation

Strong, nervy and challenging

—— The New York Times

Startlingly powerful

—— Dorothy Allison

A witty, angry and anguished novel

—— Publishers Weekly

The questions that the novel stages about action, complicity, and discomfort are evergreen, but they resonate with particular force for any American trying to figure out their relationship to Trump and Trumpism now

—— Peter C. Baker , The New Yorker

This is the first work of fiction I've read about AIDS that portrays the enormous activist response the epidemic has generated...Schulman's people are fighters...terrifically inspiring examples of the human spirit's passion for revival

—— David Leavitt

This emotional book won't make the walls of repression crumble, but it might make you understand this painful, hopeful moment better

—— The Village Voice

Redemption Falls is trauma incarnate, but its effect is both compassionate and luminous

—— TLS

Books of this quality demand to be reread to reveal more of their complexities and layers of meaning. Redemption Falls would reward this on the level of its rich textures of language alone

—— Sunday Herald

Ta-Nehisi Coates has emerged as an important public intellectual and perhaps America's most incisive thinker about race.

—— New York Times

Slavery, forgetting and memory are at the heart of Coates's ambitious, compelling first novel...

—— TLS

A rich, imaginative, vividly characterised rite-of-passage tale

—— Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

High-octane adventure accompanies ingenious plotting

—— The Times
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