Like many avid readers, we’ve been eagerly watching the new Wuthering Heights trailers emerge — a fresh interpretation of one of literature’s most enduring dark and gothic novels.
A reminder of how powerfully atmosphere, longing, and landscape can shape a story.
If you’re anything like us at Experience 27, the shortened days of winter invite a slower rhythm. This is the season for interiors — for disappearing into books that reward attention and mood. Think lounging on the sofa, a cashmere blanket, softened light, a glass of red wine, and a novel that stays with you long after the page is turned.
These are four we’re reaching for now.
My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier
A young man becomes entangled in the legacy of his cousin’s mysterious wife — a woman both captivating and suspect. The story unfolds not through action, but through doubt, suggestion, and the slow erosion of certainty. Nothing is ever fully proven, and that lingering unease is precisely the point.
Like Wuthering Heights, the novel resists moral clarity. Desire is never clean, love is inseparable from suspicion, and the emotional terrain feels as treacherous as the physical one. Both stories understand that obsession doesn’t require resolution — only proximity — and that longing often thrives in ambiguity.
What we return to, again and again, is du Maurier’s restraint. She trusts the reader completely, allowing tension to build quietly and settle deep rather than announce itself. It’s elegant, unsettling, and emotionally intelligent — a novel that refuses to explain itself, and endures because of it.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
The story unfolds within a house set apart from the world, where two sisters live according to their own rituals and rules. What begins as quiet domesticity slowly reveals itself as something far more charged — a closed system shaped by loyalty, fear, and an unspoken understanding of threat. The unease builds gently, almost politely, until it becomes impossible to ignore.
As with Wuthering Heights, this is a novel about emotional isolation and the power of insularity. Where Brontë uses landscape and weather to mirror obsession, Shirley Jackson turns inward, letting the domestic sphere become its own terrain of control. Love here is protective but suffocating, intimacy both refuge and weapon.
What draws us back is Jackson’s precision. Nothing is overstated, nothing explained away. The restraint is radical — dark without theatrics, unsettling without noise. It’s a book that understands how power can exist in withdrawal, and how silence, when carefully held, can be its own form of authority.
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
This book begins in the aftermath of sudden loss, not with answers but with repetition — the mind circling what it cannot accept. Joan Didion writes from inside grief, observing her own thoughts with clinical clarity, testing memory, logic, and language as tools for survival rather than comfort.
Though far from gothic in form, it shares Wuthering Heights’ emotional intensity and refusal of consolation. Both confront love as something destabilizing, something that can unmoor even the most disciplined inner life. There is no neat resolution offered here — only the steady act of bearing witness.
What we love most is Didion’s composure. She writes without ornament, without sentimentality, and without asking the reader for empathy. Language becomes structure; clarity becomes a way to hold chaos at arm’s length. Quiet, devastating, and deeply controlled — a reminder that restraint itself can be an act of strength.
Italian Shoes, Henning Mankell
“The room always smelled of lavender and tears.”
From the very first chapter, memory and sensation carry the weight of the story. Fredrik Welin’s life unfolds as a quiet excavation of the past — not through dramatic revelation, but through the slow accumulation of what he cannot forget. He lives in isolation on a wintry island, cutting a hole in the ice each morning and lowering himself into freezing water simply to feel alive again, a ritual that becomes as much a testament to endurance as it is to his emotional stasis.
This is not a passionate or gothic romance in the Brontë sense, yet it shares with Wuthering Heights a deep understanding of how intimacy leaves marks that time doesn’t erase, only dulls. When a figure from Fredrik’s past — the woman he once loved and walked away from — reappears, it does not reignite youthful fire so much as confront him with the unfinished business of his life. The story becomes a slow realization that the places we carry emotional history are as real as any physical terrain.
What stays with us is the novel’s meticulous attention to what is unspoken — the ache of absence, the recoil from vulnerability, the quiet recalibration of a life thought concluded. Mankell allows these emotions to surface not as confession but as lived fact, and in doing so shows that love and regret can reshape a life long after the passionate moment has passed. It’s a novel of residual feeling and internal terrain — reflective, unadorned, and deeply human.
