The obvious risk with a two-timeline novel is that one line has to carry the other, and here the 1692 chapters do the heavy lifting from the first page. Kirkus Reviews, which was not kind to this book overall, still conceded that Caroline's story is riveting thanks to high stakes and gratifying twists, and that is exactly how it plays in the ear. A woman is accused, tried and condemned by people who need her guilty, and McFadden writes the courtroom and the crowd with real venom. One early listener said that during the trial they were absolutely furious, and kept getting angrier at characters who lie with a straight face. Same here, while doing the dishes, which is a strange way to end up shouting at a magistrate.

What holds the whole thing together is the construction. The two narratives alternate in first person, present tense, and the modern chapters gradually begin to echo the historical ones, so the same betrayal is replayed in another century under other names. That echo is the trick of the book, and McFadden manages it without stopping to explain herself. The middle chapters, where Julia works out what the house actually wants, are slower and more domestic, but they earn their keep: by the time the two lines converge you have been trained to notice small things, which is exactly what the ending needs you to do.

On audio, the pairing of Saskia Maarleveld and Marin Ireland is smart casting. The 1692 material arrives with period language, and the opening chapters ask your ear to settle into an older rhythm. It takes a chapter or two, and then the register stops being decoration and starts doing work: the shift between centuries is audible rather than announced, which is more than most duet productions manage.

Now the one thing that did not land for me, and it is small. The ending explains a great deal at once. Once the reveals start in the last stretch they keep arriving in a queue, and there were two moments where I hit rewind because I had missed a name that turned out to matter. A listener who got an early copy put it well: they would have preferred the revelations to come more gradually, so the suspense could build across the book instead of unloading at the end. I felt that too. My honest compromise is that the payoff is worth the pile-up and the pieces do fit, but the last act is a sprint where the rest of the book was a walk, and I wanted more breathing room before the final twist landed.

Everything around that is genuinely well made. The ghost story is old-fashioned in the best sense, working with sound and stopped clocks rather than gore, and the house itself is a character with a memory. If you bounced off McFadden's recent run and want the one where she tries something new, this is it, and it is also, obviously, a perfect October listen. One warning, delivered plainly and not as a complaint: the witch-trial chapters are brutal in the way witch trials always were, and a woman is condemned and killed for it on the page. It is not gratuitous, but it is not soft either.

If you want the McFadden who stays closer to the domestic thriller, the site also has The Dinner Party, and for the book that made her a household name there is The Housemaid. If the estate-with-secrets angle is what pulled you in, The Divorce is a nastier, faster version of the same appetite.