vox hunt: just can't get enough

Show us a book you've read more than once.

Rebecca

Daphne Du Maurier

(If you've never read it, it's not a cheesy romance novel, in spite of the misleading Danielle Steel-esque cover they've been forcing the trade paperback to wear for some time now. Thankfully I own an older version.)

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, not the site itself, a jewel held in the palm of the hand.

The house in Rebecca is such a central character that it gets a name, while the narrator never tells us hers--Rebecca is the name of the narrator's husband's first wife, and she's dead before the book even begins. All we know, based on a compliment that Maxim de Winter gives her shortly after they first meet, is that she has a "lovely and unusual name" that most people spell wrong.

I've read this book countless times over the past 25 years or so, yet I only recently found out that "Manderley" is a form of the name "Mandalay", which was the last imperial capital of Burma.