Doughty (Crazy Paving), author of several novels and a nonfiction book based on her column in London’s Daily Telegraph, tackles the loss of life, love, and rationality. Laura Needham is a single mother raising two children, nine-year-old Betty and her younger brother, Rees. On page one, police arrive at Laura’s door with the news that Betty has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. As Laura grapples with her daughter’s death, her already complicated relationship with her ex-husband grows more so. “Before” and “After” sections alternately detail Laura’s past and present with her husband, his new girlfriend, and their new baby, and chronicles Laura slowly losing control of her mind. In the process, she discovers an anger that will not go away, and moves to the brink of a breakdown that might end in violence. As Laura sinks more deeply into grief, anger, and disorientation, opportunities for healing appear unexpectedly, yielding a heartfelt and affecting story. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Company. (Apr.)
This exquisitely calibrated depiction of one mother’s grief and rage will hold you spellbound.” — Parade
“[A] pulse-quickening literary thriller.” — Marie Claire
“A gripping and heart-wrenching novel.” — National Examiner
“You never wonder about character motivation; [Doughty’s] treatment of the reasons behind each event is so thorough that even the strangest circumstances become understandable.” — Bust Magazine
“Masterful. . . . This deeply psychological story, told in first person, recalls some of the best of Gothic literature. . . . But unlike Gothic fiction, love lies at the heart of this story. . . . Gorgeously structured.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
[A] fiercely nuanced novel about love and loss. . . . Reminiscent of Alina Bronsky’s Broken Glass Park, this portrait of a mother’s disintegration and gradual coming to terms with her new reality is a powerful depiction of love, loss, and retribution.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“Seldom have the subjects of love, loss, and retribution been treated with such emotional power as they are here. Award winning English author Doughty, who is intrigued by the effects of accidents, has written a masterfully structured novel that is as indelible as it is painful.” — Booklist (starred review)
“A heartfelt and affecting story.” — Publishers Weekly
“Gripping, absorbing, beautifully constructed, and written with great sensitivity.” — Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall
“Like Zoe Heller, Doughty is masterful at combining the texture of ordinary, smugly middle-class, contemporary life with the hidden cliff edges of violence and hatred.” — Sunday Telegraph
“An incident-packed, emotionally fraught revenge tragedy. . . . Emotionally raw, sexually frank, psychologically unpredictable.” — The Guardian
“A powerful portrait of loss and its psychological consequences.” — Independent
“An unflinching reckoning with sudden, unbearable loss and obsessive vengeance. . . . Both elegy and thriller. . . . Doughty’s success lies in how intimately she engages readers to face, with Laura, the dailyness of tragedy and the ways in which suffering can blind us to our culpabilities.” — Boston Globe
Masterful. . . . This deeply psychological story, told in first person, recalls some of the best of Gothic literature. . . . But unlike Gothic fiction, love lies at the heart of this story. . . . Gorgeously structured.
You never wonder about character motivation; [Doughty’s] treatment of the reasons behind each event is so thorough that even the strangest circumstances become understandable.
Seldom have the subjects of love, loss, and retribution been treated with such emotional power as they are here. Award winning English author Doughty, who is intrigued by the effects of accidents, has written a masterfully structured novel that is as indelible as it is painful.
Booklist (starred review)
Like Zoe Heller, Doughty is masterful at combining the texture of ordinary, smugly middle-class, contemporary life with the hidden cliff edges of violence and hatred.
A gripping and heart-wrenching novel.
This exquisitely calibrated depiction of one mother’s grief and rage will hold you spellbound.
Gripping, absorbing, beautifully constructed, and written with great sensitivity.
[A] pulse-quickening literary thriller.
Like Zoe Heller, Doughty is masterful at combining the texture of ordinary, smugly middle-class, contemporary life with the hidden cliff edges of violence and hatred.
An incident-packed, emotionally fraught revenge tragedy. . . . Emotionally raw, sexually frank, psychologically unpredictable.
A powerful portrait of loss and its psychological consequences.
An unflinching reckoning with sudden, unbearable loss and obsessive vengeance. . . . Both elegy and thriller. . . . Doughty’s success lies in how intimately she engages readers to face, with Laura, the dailyness of tragedy and the ways in which suffering can blind us to our culpabilities.
A powerful portrait of loss and its psychological consequences.
"Seldom have the subjects of love, loss, and retribution been treated with such emotional power as they are here. Award winning English author Doughty, who is intrigued by the effects of accidents, has written a masterfully structured novel that is as indelible as it is painful."
Fueled by grief and a desire to avenge her nine-year-old daughter's death from a hit-and-run accident, Laura Needham loses control of her life in this fiercely nuanced novel about love and loss. Doughty (Fires in the Dark) explores both Laura's love for her husband, David, who has left her for another woman, and her obsessive desire to inflict suffering on the driver who accidentally killed Betty. All this agony is complicated by David's domestic partner, Chloe, who is violently jealous of Laura and also spiraling out of control. VERDICT Reminiscent of Alina Bronsky's Broken Glass Park, this portrait of a mother's disintegration and gradual coming to terms with her new reality is a powerful depiction of love, loss, and retribution. Doughty's writing is self-assured in this novel, which was nominated for both the Orange and the Costa prizes in Great Britain. [See Prepub Alert, 10/9/11.]—Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Dead child, cheating husband, stalking, mental breakdowns, misunderstood immigrants--few melodramatic prompts go unexplored in this tale of domestic woe. Laura, the narrator of the sixth novel by Doughty (Fires in the Dark , 2004, etc.), is suffering from two emotional catastrophes. The first is the collapse of her marriage to David, who left her for one of his co-workers. The second, and most devastating, comes a few years later, when their 9-year-old daughter, Betty, is killed in a car accident in their quiet British town. Doughty structures the story by bouncing back and forth in time to cover Laura's mental state before and after the accident. In doing so, she draws out the occasional keen observation about husbands and wives and mothers and daughters. But the novel is also saddled with bland characters and plot turns that are unengaging when they don't defy credulity. In one thread running through the story, Laura struggles to identify the author of a series of intimidating and taunting anonymous messages, but its resolution is unsurprising and ultimately irrelevant to the story. Another subplot involves the anti-immigrant sentiment that pervades the town, focused on the Albanian man driving the car that killed Betty; in time the connection between him and Laura becomes closer, but then grows unconvincing and absurd. The novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Costa Book Award, presumably on the strength of its portrait of grief--in its more meditative moments, Laura's feelings of shellshock are powerful, and her recollection of the day of Betty's death is turned with agonizingly patient prose. But such moments are overwhelmed by ungainly police-procedural touches, and the novel's shifts between the past and present sap its momentum. An overly earnest portrait of one mother's suffering.
