Dear Thief (Longlisted For The 2015 Baileys Women'S Prize)

Description: This book is longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. In the middle of a winter's night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget. Without knowing if her friend, Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night - a letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred and love. The thoughtfulness, intensity and sheer beauty of her writing in her first two novels, The Wilderness and All Is Song, brought Samantha Harvey both huge acclaim and many prize shortlistings. Those readers who loved those novels will fall on Dear Thief with relief and delight.

Review: "A glorious, sensuous, grown-up novel, intelligent and passionate." -- Tessa Hadley "Harvey's writing is stunning: an effortless spool that winds back the layers... Brilliant." -- Kate Saunders The Times "Singular and haunting." -- Stephanie Cross Daily Mail "A hypnotic read about jealousy, nostalgia and how being wronged by a friend can bruise you as badly as a broken heart." Good Housekeeping "Harvey has struck gold... Perhaps because it is so intimate, so honest, so raw, Dear Thief provokes you to think about life, and Life, and your own life." -- Claire Kilroy Guardian



Prizes: Long-listed for Folio Prize 2015.

Author Biography: Samantha Harvey was born in England in 1975. Her first novel, The Wilderness, won the Betty Trask Prize, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and for the Guardian First Book Prize. Her second novel, All is Song, was published in 2012.