Review - We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough

We Live Here Now

Sarah Pinborough
Orion, 5 June 2025 
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398722606

I'm grateful to Orion for giving me access to an advance e-copy of We Live Here Now  to consider for review.

Sarah Pinborough is the queen of the domestic tragedy, where a middle class couple have their brittle stability upset by secrets, physiological flaws and a twist of the supernatural - which sometimes seems to have been conjured by a darkness emanating from the apparent contented pair.

We Live Here Now explores just such a setup, pairing it with a convincingly Gothic setting - Larkin Lodge, a brooding house on Dartmoor, a place that, as the opening section hints with its references to Jane Eyre, has its own secrets.  It's expertly done and Pinborough guides her readers in and out of sympathy with the main protagonist, Emily, making the outlandish goings on here seem almost unexceptional and certainly quite believable.

Emily is coming to terms with drastic changes in her life, as the job she'd staked so much on is taken away from her in the aftermath of a dreadful accident. Troubled by guilt and loss, she doubts herself, she doubts her husband Freddie and, one feels, has thrown herself into the project of buying and occupying Larkin Lodge as a way of avoiding the need to confront all that. 

Freddie has his own demons - I think the reader will suspect from fairly early on that it's one of two possible things, either likely to wreck his and Emily's relationship. 

In chapters written from the point of view of each, we are soon shown the facts, but more importantly, the layers of self-justification, the accusations, and increasingly, the poisonous state of the relationship. It's all rather compelling, rather horrifying and rather ominous. And that's before Emily starts feeling there is... something... about the house.

This build was impressive - there were so many ways things might go - with an atmosphere of moral taint, a feeling that something about Larking Lodge is alive and reaching out, that Emily and Freddie - and those who lived there before them - is reaching out. But it's puzzling. As Emily becomes obsessed with the Lodge and begins to research it, she doesn't discover a simple history of tragedies. There are former owners who seem to have had a good life there. How to square that with her own feelings of distress?

Maybe it's Emily that is the problem.

That's certainly what Freddie decides.

With overtones of gaslighting, coercion and manipulation, We Live Here Now goes to some very dark places indeed. Equally at home providing the reader with a plausible nexus between individual despair and the supernatural, and a pin-sharp portrayal of middle class life and relationships, Pinborough has written a story that grabbed me and made sure I kept on until the final catastrophe(s) are resolved - or not, given the very unsettling final section.

I loved seeing the shout outs to other authors, including to a particular supernatural series whose author recently died, as well as the sense of time-encrusted mystery around what is actually wrong with Larkin Lodge and when it all began.

I would strongly recommend We Live Here Now.

For more information about We Live Here Now, see the publisher's website here.