Synopses & Reviews
"You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy," writes the unnamed narrator of
Dear Thief.
The thief is Nina, or Butterfly, who disappeared eighteen years earlier and who is being summoned by this letter, this bomb, these recollections, revisions, accusations, and confessions.
Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio.”
Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes.
While I write my spare hand might be doing anything for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach.”
Here is a rare novel that traverses the human heart in original and indelible ways.
Review
"Harvey has struck gold . . . a heady, elegiac combination of eroticism and loss, loathing and rapture.” Claire Kilroy, The Guardian (London)
Review
"A story about a long friendship and the betrayals that tore it apart,
this thoughtful meditation, interspersed with reflections on philosophy,
religion, and poetry, is about the passages of time, the accumulation
of memory, and the hard-won wisdom of aging.” Library Journal
Review
"Dear Thief is a beautiful, tentative success, a novel with no
interest in conformity. Harvey's book is propelled not by the usual
structures of novel writing but by the quality of its author's mind, by
the luminousness of her prose . . . I was at moments reminded of
Marilynne Robinson . . . Remarkable.” James Wood, The New Yorker
Synopsis
Writing to her estranged childhood friend, Butterfly, the unnamed narrator of
Dear Thief unfurls an intimate history of a friendship and a marriage. Her letter is full of recollections, revisions, accusations and confessions, and as it progresses, and we inhabit every elusive turn of the narrators mind, we understand that she is fighting for her dignity and her survival in the face of her friends terrible betrayal. As memories surface and merge with the narrators imagination the novel becomes a triangular love story that is as haunting as it is masterful.
Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes. The result is a novel that traverses the human heart in original and indelible ways.
About the Author
Born in Kent, England, in 1975, SAMANTHA HARVEY, has an MA in philosophy and an MA, with distinction, from the Bath Spa Creative Writing course in 2005. In addition to writing, she has traveled extensively and taught in Japan and lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She has written two other novels,
The Wilderness which was a Man Booker Prize nominee and Orange Prize finalist, and
All Is Song. She recently cofounded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.