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The House That Chooses Its Guests
Paperback
Series: Anime Di Pietra, Book 1
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ISBN13: 9798184927855
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 30 2026
Pages: 242
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.61 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 30 2026
Pages: 242
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.61 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
THE HOUSE THAT CHOOSES ITS GUESTS BY RAFFAELE PISCITELLI
Houses don't remember who built them. They remember who tried to lie within their walls. London, 10th January 1913. Seven people receive a letter on ivory paper, vertical handwriting, no sender. Villa Alderton on Hampstead Heath wishes to meet them. Friday evening. Dinner will be served. An overnight stay is recommended.
Houses don't remember who built them. They remember who tried to lie within their walls. London, 10th January 1913. Seven people receive a letter on ivory paper, vertical handwriting, no sender. Villa Alderton on Hampstead Heath wishes to meet them. Friday evening. Dinner will be served. An overnight stay is recommended.
None of them know one another. Or at least - so they believe.
Jonathan Mercer, an architect who consults for Scotland Yard, is the first to notice something is wrong: the villa does not appear on any of London's official cadastral maps. No floor plans on record, no administrative history after 1886. As though someone had built a three-hundred-square-metre-per-floor building in the heart of Hampstead Heath and no one had ever asked the obvious question: who granted permission?
That first evening, among the seven guests - a former judge, a widow, a reverend, a doctor, a journalist, an army captain, and a noblewoman - something impossible emerges: they were all in Whitechapel on the same night thirty years ago. A warehouse fire. Eleven dead. A story never fully explained.
The house already knew.
Every room is calibrated to one of them - the scents change for each person who enters, the light shifts, the music plays on its own. This is not magic: it is science applied to pain. Someone spent decades studying the neurology of memory and built a precise instrument to bring to the surface what seven people had buried. A chemical diffusion system in the ventilation, walls designed to resonate differently depending on who touches them, white rooms where a chair at the centre waits.
When the first guest disappears - found later in the cellar, seated, elegantly dressed, with an impossible smile and a key in his left hand - Jonathan understands that time is running short. With Scotland Yard Inspector Eleanor Graves and with Daniel, a fourteen-year-old coal delivery boy who sees the structure of the house without being distorted by it, Jonathan must find the Curator before the house completes its work on every guest.
But the Curator is not hiding. He is waiting. And what he wants is not as simple as it seems.
A novel about guilt as architecture. About memory that does not disappear but settles, takes form, becomes physical place. About the fine line between justice and vengeance - and who has the right to draw it when the courts do not.
Jonathan Mercer, an architect who consults for Scotland Yard, is the first to notice something is wrong: the villa does not appear on any of London's official cadastral maps. No floor plans on record, no administrative history after 1886. As though someone had built a three-hundred-square-metre-per-floor building in the heart of Hampstead Heath and no one had ever asked the obvious question: who granted permission?
That first evening, among the seven guests - a former judge, a widow, a reverend, a doctor, a journalist, an army captain, and a noblewoman - something impossible emerges: they were all in Whitechapel on the same night thirty years ago. A warehouse fire. Eleven dead. A story never fully explained.
The house already knew.
Every room is calibrated to one of them - the scents change for each person who enters, the light shifts, the music plays on its own. This is not magic: it is science applied to pain. Someone spent decades studying the neurology of memory and built a precise instrument to bring to the surface what seven people had buried. A chemical diffusion system in the ventilation, walls designed to resonate differently depending on who touches them, white rooms where a chair at the centre waits.
When the first guest disappears - found later in the cellar, seated, elegantly dressed, with an impossible smile and a key in his left hand - Jonathan understands that time is running short. With Scotland Yard Inspector Eleanor Graves and with Daniel, a fourteen-year-old coal delivery boy who sees the structure of the house without being distorted by it, Jonathan must find the Curator before the house completes its work on every guest.
But the Curator is not hiding. He is waiting. And what he wants is not as simple as it seems.
A novel about guilt as architecture. About memory that does not disappear but settles, takes form, becomes physical place. About the fine line between justice and vengeance - and who has the right to draw it when the courts do not.
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