The Stopped Heart

I raced through this compelling story of parental heartbreak interspersed with the unravelling a century-old crime.

Cathy Rentenbrink, Bookseller

Filled with darkness… An unsettling and disturbing tale.

Beth Jones, Sunday Telegraph

Myerson evokes mystery and madness, with glimpses into devastating events, the full extent of which are slowly and skilfully uncovered.

Hannah Nathanson, Vogue

Darkness courses through Myerson’s psychological horror novel.

Francesca Angelini, Sunday Times

The story is heart wrenching, unremittingly grisly… A thriller and…a page-turner… The Stopped Heart exposes the flesh of the lives cut in half, the pain and loves of the past, and why they are no less real than the present.

Heloise Wood, Independent on Sunday

A brilliantly unsettling read. Myerson’s elegant prose creates a suffocating feeling of dread as the psychological consequences of loss and violence are mercilessly revealed.

Eithne Farry, Mail on Sunday

The ever enjoyable Julie Myerson has produced a haunting story of love and loss, whose mystical theme is that extreme tragedy leaves a stain that never truly dies… Gripping and moving.

John Harding, Daily Mail

Unsettling and unputdownable.

Woman & Home

A terrifying ghost story… The book is shot through with memories of abducted children…and yet it is not mawkish or sentimental. There is hope, greed, anger, compassion…. Myerson has taken us to the precipice and made us look over.

Liz Hoggard, Independent

A heart-stopper: a luxuriously paced but utterly gripping tale… Ruthlessly addictive.

Claire Allfree, Metro

Interweaving a modern psychological drama with the timeline of the past, this is powerful unsettling stuff.

Sunday Mirror

Heart wrenching, unremittingly grisly and packed with the ghosts of dead children… A thriller and…a page-turner.

Irish Independent

A deeply wrought and mysterious study of a family and tragic loss.

Eastern Daily Press

An engrossing thriller that weaves a century-old crime around a tale of parental heartbreak.

Stylist Magazine

It’s the sort of book you cannot put down, partly because it is so addictive and partly because if you do put it down, you know you will spend the next few hours startling at every creaking door… It really is unremittingly, heart-stoppingly dark.

Viv Groskop, Observer

This is a book that you will turn through the night to reach its conclusion — Myerson has you dying for the end and even surer that you will do just that when you get there. Spoiler alert: don’t expect roses around the door.

The Times

Myerson is back on triumphant form.

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Chilling and full of psychological suspense.

Steve Russell, French Property News

Chilling and full of psychological suspense.

Steven Russell, Eastern Daily Press

Two stories are skilfully grafted into something strange and unsettling; the author creates an atmosphere you can practically taste.

Kate Saunders, Saga

A haunting read.

Choice Magazine

Myerson is a practiced and evocative writer.

Alex Clark, Spectator

Its compelling and brutal psychological honesty make it arguably Julie Myerson’s greatest literary achievement to date… The Stopped Heart floes like two turbulent rivers… She is a faithful and empathic recorder of the terrible depths of parental loss… Saturated in sadness, The Stopped Heart is a fine novel that will make a profound and long-lasting impression on the reader… A perfect summer read.

Paul Simon, Morning Star

There’s a rhythm to these purposeful leaps between past and present that becomes part of the experience of reading this increasingly gripping novel.... The German word unheimlich captures best what Myerson writes about so well: that eerie sense when something is both familiar and unfamiliar

New York Times

The German word unheimlich captures best what Myerson writes about so well: that eerie sense when something is both familiar and unfamiliar. The English word for that is 'uncanny'.

Katherine Weber, New York Times

Gripping parallel narratives look at a Suffolk cottage’s residents.

Finenotes

It is so sophisticated in its emotional insights and its ingenious construction, vividly written and compelling enough to keep one hooked.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman, Book of the Year

May be Julie Myerson’s best novel yet… Both a page-turning thriller and a serious examination of how abuse works… A brilliant read and anyone you give it to on Christmas Day is likely to disappear until they've finished it.

A Little Bird, Book of the Year

Julie Myerson’s ninth novel – alive with the corpses of dead children – is part thriller, part thoughtful meditation on grief and personal history.

Alex O'Connell, The Times

So meticulously does Myerson draw these characters and so intricately does she interweave the narratives that reading the novel is like watching a film and shouting at the screen while a character fails to notice the murdered hiding under the bed. The Stopped Heart is an eerie and disquieting ghost story about the natures of male desire, teenage rites of passage and how grief can shift the prism through which we perceive both the past and the present.

Hannah Beckerman, Observer