“Aiden Bishop wakes in the body of a stranger at a 1920s English country house. He has eight chances, eight different bodies, to solve Evelyn Hardcastle's murder before time loops again.”
What's in this book
- Stuart Turton's 2018 debut mystery — Aiden Bishop wakes in eight different bodies at a 1920s country house
- Costa First Novel Award winner 2018; canonical contemporary literary commercial mystery
- 480 pages of nested-narrative construction across one looping country-house murder day
- 2024 Netflix limited series adaptation is in production
- James Cameron Stewart audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Magpie Murders, The Thursday Murder Club, The Maid, and contemporary literary commercial mystery
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is Stuart Turton's 2018 debut novel, the Costa First Novel Award winner and one of the canonical contemporary literary commercial mysteries of the past decade. The structural premise is Aiden Bishop, who wakes up in the body of a stranger at Blackheath, a remote 1920s English country house, on the morning of Evelyn Hardcastle's birthday-and-engagement weekend. Evelyn will be murdered at eleven o'clock that evening. Aiden has eight chances, eight different hosts (the doctor, the butler, the banker, the rake, the policeman, the playboy, the painter, the matriarch's son), to solve the murder. If he fails the seventh time, the day loops back and he starts again with no memory. There are also two other Aiden-equivalent guests at Blackheath. They are competing.
Turton's structural method is the patient nested-narrative construction — each of the eight hosts has a different physical capability, social position, and operational interior, and Aiden's POV-switching between them across the looping day produces the kind of structural mystery the contemporary literary commercial mystery market has been trying to figure out for forty years. The Blackheath setting is rendered with the kind of patient country-house-mystery texture that Agatha Christie established and that the broader literary-mystery tradition has been refining ever since. The novel's structural argument (that the operational mechanics of an English country-house murder mystery can be turned into a sustained meta-literary interrogation of the genre conventions themselves) is made through the texture of the looping-day structure rather than through any direct argument. The 2024 Netflix limited series adaptation is in production.
Recommended for literary commercial mystery readers, for the contemporary mystery-of-the-decade audience, and for fans of Agatha Christie, Anthony Horowitz, and the broader contemporary country-house-mystery tradition. Read The Devil and the Dark Water (2020) and The Last Murder at the End of the World (2024) next. Compare to Magpie Murders, The Thursday Murder Club, and contemporary literary commercial mystery. The James Cameron Stewart audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1985 review. A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849. The most violent American novel of the late twentieth century and the rare McCarthy book that demands the prose attention it requires.
Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 2012 review. Thomas Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour. Booker Prize 2012, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy, and the rare novel that exceeds an already-canonical predecessor.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 2023 review. A 1972 skeleton found at the bottom of a Pottstown, Pennsylvania well sends the novel back to a 1930s neighborhood where Black, Jewish, and immigrant families lived alongside each other. The most important American novel of 2023.
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 2016 review. Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation, escapes north via an actual underground railroad, a literalized version of the metaphor. Pulitzer Prize 2017 and the National Book Award winner that defined the contemporary Black literary moment.
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 2009 review. Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son who rose to serve Henry VIII, reorganizes the English state at the cost of his own soul. Booker Prize 2009 and the most important historical novel of the twenty-first century.
More by this author