Dear Thief: A Novel (Paperback)
Description
From acclaimed Booker Prize Winner, Orange Prize and Guardian First Book Award finalist Samantha Harvey, a stunning novel of female friendship, betrayal, and revenge
"You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy," writes the unnamed narrator of Dear Thief.
The thief is Nina, or Butterfly, who disappeared eighteen years earlier and who is being summoned by this letter, this bomb, these recollections, revisions, accusations, and confessions.
"Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio."
Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes.
"While I write my spare hand might be doing anything for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach."
Dear Thief is a rare novel that traverses the human heart in a striking and indelible way.
About the Author
Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, Orbital, which won the Booker Prize, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Praise For…
“Dear Thief is a beautiful, tentative success, a novel with no interest in conformity. Harvey’s book is propelled not by the usual structures of novel writing but by the quality of its author’s mind, by the luminousness of her prose . . . I was at moments reminded of Marilynne Robinson . . . Remarkable.” — James Wood, The New Yorker
“Dear Thief is a hypnotic, beautiful and sometimes dark incantation—a letter to an old friend that lures the reader in and doesn’t let go. Samantha Harvey’s novel is a deftly drawn reminder of our deeply human desire for connection and the risk involved in the revelation of that desire.” — A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven and The End of Alice
“Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief is a novel of profound beauty. I’ll leave it at that.” — Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and The Snow Queen
“A glorious, sensuous, grown-up novel, intelligent and passionate.” — Tessa Hadley, author of Clever Girl and The London Train
"Harvey's innovations electrify every word...A heady, elegiac combination of eroticism and loss, loathing and rapture, the messy complexity of a spurned woman's emotional landscape...Dear Thief provokes you to think about life, and Life, and your own life, the people in it as well as the ghosts." — The Guardian
“With her eerie and arresting latest, Harvey (The Wilderness) gives the neologism ‘frenemy’ a full-book treatment . . . This controlled, thrilling novel derives its power from the perversity of a friendship in which the pair is ‘always closer when one has taken too much from the other.’” — Publishers Weekly
‘A story about a long friendship and the betrayals that tore it apart, this thoughtful meditation, interspersed with reflections on philosophy, religion, and poetry, is about the passages of time, the accumulation of memory, and the hard-won wisdom of aging.” — Library Journal
