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  • Published: 2 November 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099597667
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

Dear Thief





A novel about female friendship, betrayal and imagination from the prize-winning author of The Wilderness and All is Song

Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2015 Jerwood Prize

**FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL**

Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2015 Jerwood Prize

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.

  • Published: 2 November 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099597667
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey is the author of The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind. She appeared on the longlists for the Bailey’s Prize and the Man Booker, and the shortlists of the James Tait Black Award, the Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness won the Betty Trask Award in 2009. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

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