Hangsaman (Penguin Classics)

Seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite lives at the edge of full consciousness — barely present in her family's household, dominated by a brilliant, oppressive father — until she leaves for college and finds that her emotional architecture of unreality has simply transplanted itself to a new location. What follows is a slow, precise dissection of a young woman who may be losing her grip on what is real and what she has invented to survive the world as she finds it. Shirley Jackson's second novel, first published in 1951, is a predecessor to We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House.

Julia Whelan's narration gives Jackson's prose its proper dreamy, unsettling quality — the kind of voice that can make uncertainty feel like the text's governing principle rather than a flaw in comprehension. At just under nine hours, the production creates a listening experience that feels genuinely disorienting in the way Jackson intends: the reader is never entirely sure where Natalie ends and her mind's constructions begin. An essential listen for fans of literary horror and psychological fiction.