The House on the Strand

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The House on the Strand is a novel by Daphne du Maurier, first published in 1969 and thus one of her later works.

Like many of du Maurier's novels, The House on the Strand has a supernatural element. It is concerned with the apparent ability to travel back in time and experience historical events at first hand.

The narrator, Dick Young, goes to stay with a friend, Magnus Lane, in Cornwall, in order to help him in a scientific experiment. Shortly afterwards, his friend is killed in what seems like a bizarre accident or suicide. Dick understands what has happened as a result of himself taking the drug with which Lane has been experimenting. He finds that it enables him to travel through the landscape around him as it was during the fourteenth century. He becomes drawn into the lives of the people he sees there, particularly Isolda Carminowe, and he is soon addicted to his nightly experiments.