About this item
Highlights
- Part revenge tale, part fairytale, The Harpy is an electrifying story of marriage, infidelity and power by the author of the #1 Indie Next Pick, The End We Start From, Megan HunterLucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire.
- About the Author: 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.
- 208 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Family Life
Description
About the Book
Part revenge tale, part fairytale, The Harpy is an electrifying story of marriage, infidelity and power by the author of the #1 Indie Next Pick, The End We Start From, Megan HunterBook Synopsis
Part revenge tale, part fairytale, The Harpy is an electrifying story of marriage, infidelity and power by the author of the #1 Indie Next Pick, The End We Start From, Megan Hunter
Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy has set her career aside in order to devote 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, Jake.
The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but make a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage-she will hurt him three times.
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 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, control and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal.
Review Quotes
A MILLIONS Most Anticipated Book of the Month
A Best Book of Fall for ESQUIRE
A VOGUE Novel Editors Recommend for Fall
A LITERARY HUB 20 books that are laced with sinister magic
"A beautiful, poetic account of [a] marriage, and also an insightful character study. . . . It is introspective and the prose is quietly beautiful. . . . And when it borders on a dark fairy tale, The Harpy soars."-NPR
"With shades of Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell, Hunter turns in an unforgettable magical realist story of power, revenge, and transformation."--Esquire Best Books for Fall
"Hunter is more concerned with the psychic injuries we inflict on the people we love than the physical ones, and physical form, in fact, becomes something mutable and ineffable, with the figure of the harpy--a mythic creature with a bird's body and a woman's head--assuming increasing prominence."--Chloe Schama, Vogue "14 Novels Vogue Editors Recommend for Fall"
"Worth the anticipation...a fascinating descent into a woman scorned...Megan Hunter is a beautiful observer of the minutiae in a soured marriage; she has this way of picking up these little details, these tiny scraps, and wielding them in a way that pierces. Toggling between their dark present and the narrator's lifelong fascination with the mythical figure of the harpy, the novel has a sinister, fairy-tale like quality. In this space, Megan Hunter has carved out a place for a woman between Virgin and Whore, a third kind of woman that claws at your insides long after you've shut the book."--Katie Yee, Literary Hub
"A taut horror story wrapped inside a domestic drama of two people at war with each other. A scarily satisfying read."--Library Journal
"A sleek, supernatural thriller. Lucy's narration is irresistible...Hunter maintains suspense until the final act of her satisfactory tale."--Publishers Weekly
"The Harpy asks its readers to consider whether emotional violence can be uncoupled from its physical counterpart, and whether one can justify the other. By blurring the boundaries of the two - a mild poisoning and revenge pornography occupy the same textual category of harm - the novel sketches out the unsettling psychological terrain that can lie beneath bourgeois marital composure."-- Guardian (UK)
"What's the point of writing an unoriginal sentence? A predictable sentence? A sequence of words that has been committed to paper hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before? This seems to be Megan Hunter's starting point whenever she sets out to write a novel. [...] A big part of what makes Hunter's writing so special is her unerring knack for describing very specific sensations in novel yet instantly-relatable ways. [...] a gripping, psychologically astute account of a relationship in free-fall."--Scotland on Sunday (UK)
"Hunter [writes] viscerally and incisively about her real themes: the taboos of female desire and rage; the loss of self that comes with motherhood; and the violence inflicted on women's bodies by both childbirth and men. [...] The momentum builds to a hallucinatory conclusion which sets this striking, pared-down modern myth apart from the mass of domestic noirs."--Daily Mail (UK)
"What appears to be a simple story about a wronged wife is anything but in the hands of such a
About the Author
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 poetry, short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The White Review, the TLS, Literary Hub, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. Her second novel, The Harpy, will be published in 2020.