As the summer ends the autumn mist begins to roll off the water towards Simone’s home, a chilling metaphor for the turn of events which are about to engulf her life. This is a story about relationships and blackmail, past and present lives, intertwined in a haunting, intense thriller. Do not expect the fast pace of a “whodunit” though, this is a novel which slowly and eerily unravels almost as if we are watching in slow motion as each moment effects the next.
'There are things you should know about blackmail, in case it comes tapping at your door'
Simone reluctantly gives up her thriving London legal practice to take a highly paid, but stressful, job as a District Judge. With two small boys and a husband on the verge of bankruptcy and breakdown, she struggles to maintain a normal family life. Then one morning a letter arrives, addressed to her and postmarked New York. Someone she has tried to forget has not forgotten her ...
'Dunmore is chillingly adept at the portrayal of lust and its close cousin, revulsion...she explores the slow-burning preliminaries to the kind of violence possible in the most ordinary and controlled of lives' - Frances Fyfield, Independent
'A highly-charged, haunting novel... In a beautifully wrought examination of a woman's sensibility, blackmail, compounded by obsession and love, slides in at the window' - Elizabeth Buchan, The Times
Helen Dunmore was the author of fourteen novels. Her first, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led to D H Lawrence’s expulsion from Cornwall (on suspicion of spying) during the First World War. It won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize, now the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction. Her bestselling novel The Siege, set during the Siege of Leningrad, was described by Antony Beevor as ‘a world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize.
Helen Dunmore’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and she was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She died in June 2017.
