Excerpt from Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He felt the proximity of her a few feet away. Hayley Sinclair, the performer from the show that he had, barely an hour previously, eviscerated on the page, the recipient of his solitary, condemning star. She was drinking gin and sitting with her body turned half¬way into the room, watching who came in.

"A Guinness, on your own?" Her voice was deeper than it had been onstage. As he'd noticed during her show, she sounded Amer¬ican, though she used British phrasing and over-pronounced her consonants, as if she'd lived here for a while. It was already hoarse. A voice that wouldn't last the whole month. "Must be bad."

"The show I saw wasn't great." He had been sitting deeply enough in the shadows of the auditorium that there's no way she would have seen him, still less remembered his face. He would reflect, later, when he was telling me all this, that he could have ended the conversation there. "You?"

"I'm a performer. I just did my first show. You never know how it's going to go down, but I think it was OK. I got here after they'd stopped doing the pies, too."

Hayley was sitting up very straight and tapping one foot on the bar stool. She was lit with unspent adrenaline, physically almost buzzing. And she was alone. Doing a solo show was a dangerous kind of loneliness. It meant no company to debrief and decom¬press with afterwards. Alex could indulge that lack, as a form of kindness. She didn't have to know who he was. She didn't have to know that he had even been in the audience.

Excerpted from Bring the House Down: A Novel by Charlotte Runcie. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Charlotte Runcie.