The Harpy

The Harpy is brilliant. Hunter imbues the everyday with apocalyptic unease. A deeply unsettling, excellent read. -- Daisy Johnson, Booker shortlisted author of <i>Everything Under</i> In The Harpy, Hunter has articulated female rage in a way that lives on in your bones and in your gut. A genuinely thrilling read, one long beautiful scream. -- Evie Wyld The Harpy is an almost perfect book. The premise is so simple, and the execution so flawless . . . I've talked about it more than anything else I've read so far this year: I love explaining the set-up to friends and watching their eyes widen. It's so dark and so much fun. -- Kristen Roupenian, author of <i>Cat Person</i> Sentence after sentence made my skin bump. Not just with what the sentence said, but because the writing was so very, very good. It's a brilliant piece of work. -- Cynan Jones, author of <i>Cove</i> Utterly compelling . . . so precise and darkly truthful. I thought it succeeding in illuminating - with flair and originality - the damage done by betrayal. -- Esther Freud I was utterly spellbound. Her dark humour and pointillist prose puts her in league with Lydia Davis and Jenny Offil, masterfully rendering the emotional shock of a protagonist finding her life has become story. -- Olivia Sudjic, author of <i>Sympathy</i> A sharp, timely and darkly funny novel about maternal love and sacrifice, and the incandescent rage that festers beneath it. Hunter's writing is beautiful and spare, uncanny and hilarious. I utterly loved it. -- Luiza Sauma, author of<i> Flesh and Bone and Water</i> A beautifully written, viscerally disturbing novel that turns the narrative of the cheated-on wife on its head -- Laura Kaye, author of <i>English</i> <i>Animals</i> The Harpy is a taut and lyrical novel about cosily calibrated lives coming spectacularly undone. Compulsively absorbing yet otherworldly, both a fever dream and a gorgeous and alarming howl of rage. -- Sharlene Teo, author of <i>Ponti</i> In hungry, restless prose, Megan Hunter tears apart the seam between motherhood and the monstrous. She confronts the fear of female anger and asks us what happens when pain that has been swallowed through generations begins to rush to the surface. -- Jessica Andrews, author of <i>Saltwater</i> Megan Hunter effortlessly compels us to feel both heartbreak and the momentary gratification of revenge . . . devastating in its evocation of the expense and sometimes fatal strain of passion, grief, and rage.' -- Susanna Moore, author of <i>In the Cut</i> I was moved, terrified, uplifted - sometimes all three at once -- Tracy Chevalier, author of <i>Girl With a Pearl Earring </i>on <i>The End We Start From</i> Engrossing, compelling -- Naomi Alderman, author of <i>The Power </i>on <i>The End We Start From</i> Startling . . . beautiful and insightful. Everyone who reads this will come away feeling renewed -- <i>Elle Magazine </i>on <i>The End We Start From</i> Hunter's spare, drumskin-tight prose zings off the page, and ingenious descriptions abound . . . It may only consist of 127 pages of impressionistic, staccato sentences, but this is a book of wide horizons and big ideas, and it's no surprise that Benedict Cumberbatch's company have just acquired movie rights. For Hunter the future looks very bright indeed -- <i>Scotland on Sunday </i>on <i>The End We Start From</i> Powerful . . . an uplifting celebration of the reality of motherhood in the face of terrifying global disaster -- <i>Daily Mail </i> on <i>The End We Start From</i> The End We Start From is a beautifully spare, haunting meditation on the persistence of life after catastrophe. I loved it -- Emily St. John Mandel, author of <i>Station Eleven </i> on <i>The End We Start From</i> Extraordinary . . . The End We Start From is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in that it shares the same narrative detachment, and the same precise poetry. It is of course told from the perspective of a mother, rather than a father, and is set in a world that is only beginning to fall into chaos. And in the midst of it all, each parent cradles their child, enchanted by their breathing. Sometimes he sleeps so quietly it seems that he has gone. Megan Hunter's remarkable debut novel feels like the other half of the story -- <i>Financial Times</i> on <i>The End We Start From</i> On one level it is the psychological excavation of a suburban marriage on the rocks, on another, a spell to summon primeval feminine power. Above all, it is prose informed by poetry . . . a brilliant and eviscerating work of literary fiction * Review 31 *