PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Casey Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker. After graduating from Harvard College with a degree in English, she earned an M.Phil in theology at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with her family. Furious Hours is her first book and was an instant New York Times bestseller.
A triumph on every level. One of the losses to literature is that Harper Lee never found a way to tell a gothic true-crime story she'd spent years researching. Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce fidelity to the truth. -- David Grann, author of 'Killers of the Flower Moon' With its rich cast of characters, the polar opposite settings of New York and rural Alabama, Cep's dark humour and painstaking research, there is a great deal to enjoy ... a rich and rewarding read. * The Times * Fascinating ... Cep has spliced together a Southern-gothic tale of multiple murder and the unhappy story of Lee's literary career, to produce a tale that is engrossing in its detail and deeply poignant... [Cep] spends the first third of Furious Hours following the jaw-dropping trail of murders ... Engrossing ... Cep writes about all this with great skill, sensitivity and attention to detail. * Sunday Times * This story is just too good ... Furious Hours builds and builds until it collides with the writer who saw the power of Maxwell's story, but for some reason was unable to harness it. It lays bare the inner life of a woman who had a world-class gift for hiding ... [this] book makes a magical leap, and it goes from being a superbly written true-crime story to the sort of story that even Lee would have been proud to write. -- Michael Lewis, author of 'Moneyball' and 'The Big Short' It's been a long time since I picked up a book so impossible to put down. Furious Hours made me forget dinner, ignore incoming calls, and stay up reading into the small hours. It's a work of literary and legal detection as gripping as a thriller. But it's also a meditation on motive and mystery, the curious workings of history, hope, and ambition, justice, and the darkest matters of life and death. Casey Cep's investigation into an infamous Southern murder trial and Harper Lee's quest to write about it is a beautiful, sobering, and sometimes chilling triumph. -- Helen Macdonald, author of 'H is for Hawk'
