THE HARPY BY MEGAN HUNTER
PAPERBACK PUBLISHED BY PICADOR 11TH JUNE 2020
Lucy works from home but devotes her life to the children, to their finely tune routine, and to the house itself, which comforts like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, Jake, he wants her to know.
The revelation marks a turning point Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage, she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take.
As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation, of both mind and body from which there is no return.
PRAISE FOR THE HARPY BY MEGAN HUNTER
Told in dazzling, musical prose, The Harpy by Megan Hunter is dark, staggering fairy tale, at once mythical and otherworldly and fiercely contemporary. It is a novel of love, marriage and its failure, of power and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal.
PART OF CHAPTER 3
This is David Holmes. I am the husband of Vanessa Holmes. I thought you should know….
A gulp here, I swallow, something too guttural to hear over the phone, the inner liquid workings of another person’s body.
Your husband Jake, Jake Stevenson is sleeping with my wife. He is I found out today. I thought you should know.
He said that twice he thought I should know. The way he said it even an adolescent boy, between high and deep it seemed significant. Well thought out, as though he knew that knowledge was important in a marriage, that it was correct. He was careful to use surnames, for everyone. To make it official. He had a serious, professor’s voice, maybe that was it. I have always had a weakness for listening to academic men, for believing what they say. I trained in the art of this at one point.
And so when I heard him say those words, the first thing I did was nod, very quickly,…….
ABOUT AUTHOR MEGAN HUNTER
Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984, and now lives in Cambridgeshire with her young family. She has a BA in English Literature from Sussex University, and an MPhil in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. She is the author of the dystopian novel The End We Start From.
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