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Paperback

Forthcoming
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English
Fourth Estate Ltd
30 September 2025
‘Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going’ GILLIAN FLYNN

'Gripping … Bravura storytelling' VOGUE

'A blood-soaked, gothic nightmare' FINANCIAL TIMES

From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a nineteenth-century women's asylum, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world.

Humiliated by a procedure gone terribly wrong, Dr Silas Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics. There, his work focuses on women who have been neglected by the state – women he subjects to grotesque modes of experimentation.

Based on authentic historical documents, Butcher is a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche.

'A ghastly and harrowing page-turner' STEPHEN KING, via X

'A triumph of style and brio’ FINANCIAL TIMES

'Terrifying' FLAUNT

'Vividly and compellingly-drawn' iNEWS
By:  
Imprint:   Fourth Estate Ltd
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm,  Spine: 26mm
Weight:   240g
ISBN:   9780008694913
ISBN 10:   0008694915
Pages:   352
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN / Malamud Award, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs and Hazards of Time Travel. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

Reviews for Butcher

'A ghastly and harrowing page-turner … Faint of heart? Stay away' Stephen King, via X 'Butcher is vivid and compellingly drawn, its prose scalpel-sharp … Oates remains a master storyteller with her finger on the pulse of humanity, forever alive to its moral failures and flaw' iNews ‘A blood-soaked, gothic nightmare … A triumph of style and brio… More than being just a medical thriller, it’s closer in temperament to works of gothic body horror, from Frankenstein through to the contemporary work of Mariana Enríquez’ Financial Times ‘Examines the agency girls and women have – or don't have – over their own bodies amid the current political debates around reproductive rights in a post-Roe v. Wade world’ Daily Mail 'Sounds like the perfect American novel, delving deep into the horrors of invention' Lit Hub, 'Most Anticipated Books of 2024' ‘Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going’ Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl 'Delightfully disturbing' iNews 'A master storyteller' The Times ‘The writing faithfully mimics 19th-century texts. Littered with italics and euphemisms, it gives a sense of both authenticity and distance’ Sophie Mackintosh, Literary Review Praise for Joyce Carol Oates: ‘One of the greatest — and most productive — living American writers’ Financial Times 'Oates is a massive literary heavyweight, and many earnestly believe she could knock the other contenders for the title of Great American Novelist' Guardian ‘One of the greatest writers of our time’ John Gardner, author of Grendel ‘[A] notoriously prolific chronicler of America’s cracked, calamitous heart’ Esquire ‘America’s preeminent fiction writer’ The New Yorker ‘Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going, as far as I’m concerned’ Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl


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