Two imposing literary figures are at the center of Susan Scarf Merrell’s suspenseful new novel, SHIRLEY. The celebrated Shirley Jackson, best known for her short story “The Lottery,” and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic and professor at Bennington College, made a fascinating, commanding couple in their day. Brilliant, flamboyant and proudly unconventional, they cast an almost magnetic spell of intellectual grandeur.

A young couple, Fred and Rose Nemser, a graduate student and his pregnant wife, move into Shirley and Stanley’s home on the Bennington campus in the summer of 1964. With her husband teaching all day, Rose forms an unlikely, turbulent friendship with the troubled and unpredictable Shirley. Intrigued by the Hymans’ tempestuous marriage and inexplicably drawn to the darkly witty author, Rose nonetheless senses something amiss --- something to do with nightly unanswered phone calls and inscrutable accounts of a long-missing female student. For fans of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINA WOOLF? and Donna Tartt’s THE SECRET HISTORY, SHIRLEY is a compelling, elegant thriller written in homage to Jackson’s own classic horror stories.