Harpy

‘Brilliant . . . A deeply unsettling, excellent read’ - Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under 'A potent contemporary fable . . . riveting' - Guardian‘Genuinely thrilling . . . one long beautiful scream’ - Evie WyldLucy lives with her husband Jake and their two boys. Her life is devoted to her children, her days mapped out by their finely tuned routine.Until a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband. He thought she should know.Lucy is distraught. She decides to stay with Jake, if only for the children’s sake, but in order to even the score, they agree that she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, or what form it will take. And so begins a delicate game of crime and punishment, 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.‘Utterly compelling . . . precise and darkly truthful’ Esther Freud

The Harpy is brilliant. Hunter imbues the everyday with apocalyptic unease. A deeply unsettling, excellent read., In The Harpy, Hunter has articulated female rage in a way that lives on in your bones and in your gut. A genuinely thrilling read, one long beautiful scream., Megan Hunter’s potent contemporary fable about the enduring taboo of female fury becomes especially relevant. Every bit as riveting as her debut The End We Start From . . . the ensuing drama blends mythic motifs with pointed swipes at modern motherhood’s double binds., The Harpy is an almost perfect book. The premise is so simple, and the execution so flawless . . . I've talked about it more than anything else I've read so far this year: I love explaining the set-up to friends and watching their eyes widen. It's so dark and so much fun., Hunter writes viscerally and incisively about the taboos of female desire and rage . . . [a] striking, pared-down modern myth

Megan Hunter’s first novel, The End We Start From, was published in 2017 in the UK, US, and Canada, and has been translated into eight languages. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Books Are My Bag Awards, longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Awards finalist and won the Foreword Reviews Editor’s Choice Award. Her writing has appeared in publications including the White Review, the TLS, Literary Hub, and BOMB magazine. She lives in Cambridgeshire with her husband, son and daughter.

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