“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” So begins Daphne du Maurier’s gothic-thriller classic, instantly setting the scene for the haunting tale that follows. As the novel’s nameless narrator recounts the early days of her marriage to wealthy widower Maxim de Winter, readers are swept up in the fever dream that was life at the eerie English estate for its young new mistress. Du Maurier expertly crafts an atmosphere of quiet dread in which Rebecca, de Winter’s first wife who died under mysterious circumstances, is never far from her successor’s mind. An immediate best seller upon its release, Rebecca has remained in print since it was published in 1938 and still sells around 4,000 copies per month. It won a National Book Award in 1938, the Anthony Award for Novel of the Century in 2000, and was voted the U.K.’s favorite book of the last 225 years in a 2017 survey run by retailer WHSmith. The novel has been successfully adapted numerous times for the stage and screen, with the best-known film version, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 movie of the same name, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. —Megan McCluskey
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