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Publication of ‘Dear Thief’, 25th September 2014

9780224101721-large“Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief is a novel of profound beauty.”  Michael Cunningham

“A glorious, sensuous, grown-up novel, intelligent and passionate.”  Tessa Hadley

“Dear Thief is a hypnotic beautiful and sometimes dark incantation–a letter to an old friend that lures the reader in and doesn’t let go. Samantha Harvey’s novel is a deftly drawn reminder of our deeply human desire for connection and the risk involved in the revelation of that desire.”
A.M. Homes

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.

“‘Dear Thief’ is a beautiful, tentative success, a novel with no interest in conformity. Harvey’s book is propelled not by the usual structures of novel writing but by the quality of its author’s mind, by the luminousness of her prose, and by an ardent innocence of speculation that is rare in contemporary fiction . . . Even as it tells its tale of determinism and fatality, this remarkable novel asserts its own curious freedoms. ” James Wood, The New Yorker
“Harvey’s innovations electrify every word . . . a heady, elegiac combination of eroticism and loss, loathing and rapture.” The Guardian

“Quite simply ravishing . . . Harvey offers an incandescent vision of hope and acceptance.” The Telegraph

“Harvey’s writing is stunning, an effortless spool that winds back the layers.” The Sunday Times

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