Catherine House -

Elizabeth Thomas

William Morrow

2020

240 páginas

8h 0m

ISBN-13: 9780062905802

Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Secluded in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, Catherine’s experimental liberal arts curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment have produced some of the world’s best minds: prizewinning authors, artists, and inventors, diplomats, Congressmen, Supreme Court justices, Presidents.

For those fortunate enough to be selected, tuition and room and board are free, but for the duration of the three-year program—summers included—Catherine’s incoming class must say goodbye to the outside world. Family, friends, newspapers, television, music, and even their wardrobes must be left behind.

Into this rarefied world arrives Ines, who—despite having traded blurry days and nights of parties, pills, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous, disorienting coursework—discovers a Catherine-sponsored environment of revelry. Through food, drink, and sexual experimentation, the students of Catherine are encouraged to expand their minds. The House’s enigmatic director Viktória urges them to make the necessary connections, to understand the patterns, that will enable them to divine their place in the world but most of all within the black iron gates of Catherine.

Catherine is the closest thing to home that Ines has ever experienced, and her stern and serious roommate Baby proves to be an unlikely friend. As Ines continues to engage in old patterns and chafe against the House’s rules, Baby’s obsessive desire for acceptance into the coveted “New Materials” program ends in her apparent suicide.

Ines’s curiosity—the driving force for her past mistakes—is redirected to find the truth behind Baby’s death. Spying on classmates’ research and seducing out their secrets, Ines discovers that Catherine—in all its shabby splendor, advanced theories, and decadence—hides a questionable yet dangerously appealing agenda for an outlier like Ines.