Publication Date: 03/09/2020 ISBN: 9781529010213 Category:

The Harpy

Megan Hunter

Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Publication Date: 03/09/2020 ISBN: 9781529010213 Category:
Hardback

£14.99

Out of stock

Description

From the acclaimed author of The End We Start From, The Harpy is a fierce tale of love, betrayal and revenge.

‘The Harpy is brilliant . . . A deeply unsettling, excellent read.’ Daisy Johnson

Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy works from home but devotes her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, he wants her to know.

The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage, she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take.

As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return.

Told in dazzling, musical prose, The Harpy by Megan Hunter is a dark, staggering fairy tale, at once mythical and otherworldly and fiercely contemporary. It is a novel of love, marriage and its failures, of power and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal.

Publisher Review

"The Harpy is brilliant. Hunter imbues the everyday with apocalyptic unease. A deeply unsettling, excellent read." -- Daisy Johnson Extraordinary . . . The End We Start From is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in that it shares the same narrative detachment, and the same precise poetry. It is of course told from the perspective of a mother, rather than a father, and is set in a world that is only beginning to fall into chaos. And in the midst of it all, each parent cradles their child, enchanted by their breathing. "Sometimes he sleeps so quietly it seems that he has gone." Megan Hunter's remarkable debut novel feels like the other half of the story -- Financial Times on The End We Start From The End We Start From is a beautifully spare, haunting meditation on the persistence of life after catastrophe. I loved it -- Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven on The End We Start From Powerful . . . an uplifting celebration of the reality of motherhood in the face of terrifying global disaster -- Daily Mail on The End We Start From Hunter's spare, drumskin-tight prose zings off the page, and ingenious descriptions abound . . . It may only consist of 127 pages of impressionistic, staccato sentences, but this is a book of wide horizons and big ideas, and it's no surprise that Benedict Cumberbatch's company have just acquired movie rights. For Hunter the future looks very bright indeed -- Scotland on Sunday on The End We Start From Startling . . . beautiful and insightful. Everyone who reads this will come away feeling renewed -- Elle Magazine on The End We Start From I was moved, terrified, uplifted - sometimes all three at once -- Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring on The End We Start From Engrossing, compelling -- Naomi Alderman, author of The Power on The End We Start From

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