Sending
In this remarkable thriller, a British estate owner with psychic powers senses he’s being hunted on his own land by a bloodthirsty beast
Alfgif Hollaston, a cultured English gentleman and painter, has returned to his childhood home in remote Somerset following the death of his father. In this confusing time, he is grateful for the nascent friendship and support of Paddy Gadsden, an amiable saddler on the family estate. But only days after his arrival, Alfgil is shocked to learn Paddy has been violently murdered. After assuming ownership of Paddy’s beloved pet, a tame and playful polecat named Meg, Hollaston—who is more attuned to the mystical than some—begins receiving strange psychic sensations. An instinctual, animalistic sense of impending danger is telling him to flee this place as fast and as far as possible. Before he knows it, this man of class and breeding finds himself abruptly and frighteningly transformed into that most primal of creatures: prey.
An ingenious novel of suspense and terror that exposes the animal within us all, Geoffrey Household’s The Sending is a masterful tale of mortal peril and self-preservation that will keep thriller fans awake and reading into the late hours of the night.
Geoffrey Household
Geoffrey Household (1900–1988) was born in England. In 1922 he earned a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from the University of Oxford. After graduation, he worked at a bank in Romania before moving to Spain in 1926 and selling bananas as a marketing manager for the United Fruit Company.
In 1929 Household moved to the United States, where he wrote children’s encyclopedia content and children’s radio plays for CBS. From 1933 to 1939, he traveled internationally as a printer’s-ink sales rep. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer for the British army, with posts in Romania, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and Persia. After the war, he returned to England and wrote full time until his death. He married twice, the second time in 1942 to Ilona Zsoldos-Gutmán, with whom he had three children, a son and two daughters.
Household began writing in the 1920s and sold his first story to the Atlantic Monthly in 1936. His first novel, The Terror of Villadonga, was published during the same year. His first short story collection, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories, appeared in 1938. Altogether, Household wrote twenty-eight novels, including four for young adults; seven short story collections; and a volume of autobiography, Against the Wind (1958). Most of his novels are thrillers, and he is best known for Rogue Male (1939), which was filmed as Man Hunt in 1941 and as a TV movie under the novel’s original title in 1976.
