In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family of Salem. The greed and haughty pride of the Pyncheon family through the generations is mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion, where the family's enfeebled and impoverished relations now live. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family's salvation—or its downfall. A brilliant intertwining of the popular, the symbolic, and the historical, Hawthorne's gothic Romance is a powerful exploration of personal and national guilt, a work that Henry James declared “the closest approach we are likely to have to the Great American Novel.”
"The greed and arrogant pride of the novel's Pyncheon family through the generations is mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion."
Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
"Hawthorne's tale of ancestral retribution and an unsettled home comes to life with Anthony Heald's rendition…With his crisp enunciation and slightly raspy timbre, Heald tackles the more interesting scenes with consistency and energy, improving one's overall experience of this classic work."
