We Live Here Now

We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough is a standalone psychological thriller published in May 2025 and a New York Times bestseller - her most overtly gothic, most horror-adjacent mainstream novel to date, and the one most frequently described by reviewers as her strongest since Behind Her Eyes. The New York Times Book Review called it "atmospheric, immersive, surprising" with closing chapters that are "a master class in twists."

Emily Bennett nearly died. She wakes from a coma after a horrific accident on holiday, her body still fragile and her memory of events before the coma unreliable in ways she's been warned may persist. When her husband Freddie suggests they leave London entirely and start over at Larkin Lodge - a handsome, isolated property on the Devon moors - Emily agrees reluctantly. The house is grey and imposing in the mist, and from the moment she steps inside, something about it feels wrong. Cold spots. Fires going out. Books falling from shelves. A room on the third floor she cannot enter without something that feels like dread rather than pain.

None of it happens when Freddie is watching. He notices nothing unusual, and has a ready explanation for everything Emily reports - her post-sepsis condition can cause hallucinations, her consultant confirmed it, perhaps she simply isn't well yet. Whether Freddie is right, or whether something is operating on a frequency only Emily can perceive, is the question Pinborough holds open for far longer than is comfortable.

The Multiple POV structure moves between Emily and Freddie in alternating chapters, giving the novel a dual Unreliable Narrator quality: Emily cannot fully trust her senses, and Freddie has his own reasons for the version of events he's presenting. The Gaslighting running through their marriage is deliberately ambiguous - Freddie may be a frightened husband trying to manage a wife with medical complications, or he may be something more calculating - and Pinborough withholds enough to keep both readings viable right up to the final stretch. A third strand, narrated from the perspective of a raven who has been at Larkin Lodge far longer than either of them, provides the novel's most unexpectedly moving thread: a creature who has lost his mate on these grounds and cannot leave, his grief rendered with real tenderness alongside the creeping supernatural dread. It's an unusual structural choice and, by reader consensus, one that pays off considerably.

The Complicated Romance between Emily and Freddie - both of them holding Dark Secrets from the other, both changed by events neither has fully disclosed - gives the haunted house premise an emotional engine beyond atmosphere. The house works on them both, amplifying the fractures already present, and Pinborough is skilled at keeping readers uncertain whether the horror is external or internal, supernatural or marital. Content advisories are worth checking in advance - the book contains explicit violence, explicit sexual content, and some scenes that earned strong content warnings from early readers.

The Twist Ending has been among Pinborough's most warmly received, praised specifically for landing in a register that surprised readers without straining credibility - no small feat given the genre's history of divisive finales. The Mystery and Secrets Revealed across the final quarter reframes the novel's central relationships with real emotional force. For readers who have followed Pinborough's career and found some of her recent thrillers uneven, this is the book most likely to bring them back fully onside.