Dear Thief
  • Published: 2 November 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099597667
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $24.99

Dear Thief

Formats & editions
EBook
25 Sep 2014
Paperback
2 Nov 2015
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Find local retailers Find local retailers Abbeys Angus & Robertson Boomerang Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Your Bookstore

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

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: $24.99
Categories:
Share…

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.

portrait photo of Samantha Harvey

Also by Samantha Harvey

Orbital
The Shapeless Unease
The Western Wind
All is Song
The Wilderness
See all

Praise for Dear Thief

Harvey’s writing is stunning: an effortless spool that winds back the layers… Brilliant.

Kate Saunders, The Times

Singular and haunting.

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

A hypnotic read about jealousy, nostalgia and how being wronged by a friend can bruise you as badly as a broken heart.

Good Housekeeping

A glorious, sensuous, grown-up novel, intelligent and passionate.

Tessa Hadley

Harvey has struck gold… Perhaps because it is so intimate, so honest, so raw, Dear Thief provokes you to think about life, and Life, and your own life.

Claire Kilroy, Guardian

Compassionate, matter-of-fact and mysterious about death and its ultimate transforming… Harvey offers an incandescent vision of hope and acceptance.

Catherine Taylor, Sunday Telegraph

Indubitably intelligent, Harvey’s prose is also quite simply ravishing.

Telegraph

Harvey’s writing is clever and thoughtful, filled with striking insights and wisdom.

Suzi Feay, Tablet

By far the best thing she’s done.

Gaby Wood, Daily Telegraph

From its opening sentences, this novel of jealousy and friendship holds you in its grip…. Harvey’s prose manages to be both wistful and unpretentious, capturing perfectly the relationship between two women in all its complexity.

Bath Chronicle

Beautiful... Exhilarating... Remarkable

James Wood, New Yorker

A quiet, unusual book, full of sad truths. I loved this epistolary novel of friendship, betrayal and forgiveness.

Paula Hawkins, author of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, Guardian

Compassionate, matter-of-fact, and mysterious about death and its ultimate transforming.

Catherine Taylor, five stars, Telegraph

Harvey handles the most difficult of subjects- ageing and death- with her distinctive brand of mystic pragmatism.

Emma Hadestadt

Atmospheric

Claire Kilroy, Guardian

Dear Thief is one of those quiet and clever books that is about everything and nothing all at once.

Savidge Reads