Description: "Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape; a paperback edition of this book was published in 2014 by Atavist Books"--Copyright page.
Brief description:
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.
Review Quotes:
"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
"Intelligent . . . ravishing . . . An incandescent vision of hope and acceptance." - Sunday Telegraph (London)
"Harvey's writing is stunning; an effortless spool that gradually winds back the layers, dropping in revelations . . . Brilliant." - The Times (London)
"A hypnotic read." - Good Housekeeping, UK
"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
"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
"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
"Visceral, haunting . . . [Dear Thief] explores the psychological trauma of an intimate betrayal with such empathy that readers will feel drawn into the narrator's own confused sense of self, fear of closeness, and longing for exactly what has hurt her." - Huffington Post