The House on the Strand

Book excerpt: A man becomes addicted to a drug that allows him to time travel into the past in this gothic thriller that is “prime du Maurier” (New York Times). Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as a guinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered in his scientific research. When Dick samples Magnus’s potion, he finds himself doing the impossible: traveling through time while staying in place, thrown all the way back into Medieval Cornwall. The concoction wears off after several hours, but its effects are intoxicating and Dick cannot resist his newfound powers. As his journeys increase, Dick begins to resent the days he must spend in the modern world, longing ever more fervently to get back into his world of centuries before, and the home of the beautiful Lady Isolda . . . Praise for Daphne Du Maurier: “No other popular writer has so triumphantly defied classification . . . She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and yet satisfied the exacting requirements of “real literature,” something very few novelists ever do.” ―Margaret Forster, author of Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller “She wrote exciting plots, she was highly skilled at arousing suspense, and she was, too, a writer of fearless originality” —The Guardian