Dear Thief – Samantha Harvey
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.
About the Author
Samantha Harvey is the author of three novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song and most recently Dear Thief, which was published in September 2014.
She’s been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She won the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize. She was named by The Culture Show as one of the 12 Best New British Novelists. She is currently serving as a member of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury.
She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Read more: http://www.samanthaharvey.co.uk/
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