Sanctuary

This Italian haunted-house story features a generations-spanning curse affecting a soon-to-be-mother. The curse begins in the late 1500s when Maddalena and her family move to their new villa with a mill on the property. Maddalena’s fellow townspeople are distrustful of the medicine she practices, while the mill and her home are beset by several catastrophic accidents. In 1933, Sibilla moves to the villa with her engineer husband, ready to raise a family here, but they too are beset by accidents, and Sibilla begins to see strange shadow shapes and bizarre accidents that pose a danger to her, her unborn child, and her family. Narrators Rachel F. Hirsch and Eva Passeltiner keep the parallel narratives distinct, even as the story moves from one timeline to the next. Their characterizations work in tandem, with Passeltiner voicing Maddalena as a confident but harried mother and Hirsch depicting an increasingly unsettled Sibilla. The supernatural elements are more prevalent in Sibilla’s story, but Repetto (The Rose Master) gradually amps up the tension in both tales until they crash head-on into a heart-wrenching ending.