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The pitch-black rediscovered classic thriller from ''one of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived'' (Virginia Feito, author of Mrs March ) - perfect for fans of Celia Dale, Shirley Jackson and Ottessa Moshfegh ''She was dead even before I became aware of her existence. . .'' When ten-year-old Maureen Sutton disappears from a sleepy village in Kent, the crime unleashes a wave of voyeuristic obsession and hysteria. With nerve, inspiration and deadpan brilliance Caroline Blackwood draws us into the village to witness the macabre and devastating effects of the story on the fragile world of Rowan Anderson, his inscrutable wife Cressida and their sickly daughter, as Cressida becomes increasingly desperate to save Mary Rose from the same fate - and perhaps even from Rowan himself. This is a mordant, skin-crawlingly unsettling - and utterly compulsive - story of repressed violence, female rage, and maternal obsession. ''Vibrates with a frenzied, manic menace'' Lucy Scholes ''A devastating investigation of neurosis, hysteria and cruelty'' Observer ''A winner . . . Guaranteed to disturb'' Sunday Times
About the author
Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996) was born into a rich Anglo-Irish aristocratic family. She rebelled against her background at an early age and led a hectic and bohemian life, which included marriages to the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as 'a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers'. In the 1970s Blackwood began to write. Her novel Great Granny Webster was shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize.
