Dear Thief

This book is Short-listed for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Long listed for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Long listed 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. 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 short listings.

Those readers who loved those novels will fall on Dear Thief with relief and delight. Review: A glorious, sensuous, grown-up novel, intelligent and passionate. -- Tessa Hadley 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 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