Harpy

I lift the razor and a fairy tale drop of blood rolls out from under the silver. The colours are the brightest I have ever seen.

Lucy and James live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy has set aside her career and devoted the hours of her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy's husband, he wants her to know.

The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and James decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage, she will hurt him three times. 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.

Told in dazzling, musical prose, The Harpy is dark, staggering fairy tale, at once mythical and otherworldly and fiercely contemporary. It is a novel of love, marriage and its failures, of power and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal.