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The Harpy

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The Harpy

Written by: Megan Hunter
Narrated by: Clare Corbett
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About this listen

From the acclaimed author of The End We Start From, The Harpy is a fierce tale of love, betrayal and revenge.

Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy works from home but devotes her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, he wants her to know.

The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage, she will hurt him three times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take.

As the couple submits to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return.

Told in dazzling, musical prose, The Harpy by Megan Hunter is a dark, staggering fairy tale, at once mythical and otherworldly and fiercely contemporary. It is a novel of love, marriage and its failures, of power and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal.

©2020 Megan Hunter (P)2020 Macmillan Publishers International Limited Genre Fiction Psychological

Critic Reviews

"The Harpy is brilliant. Hunter imbues the everyday with apocalyptic unease. A deeply unsettling, excellent read.” (Daisy Johnson)

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It is a story of Lucy and Jake; their marriage and their family. The novella follows Lucy when she discovers her husband’s infidelity after years of marriage with two little boys. She enters into this state of introspection recalling her childhood, the domestic violence she witnessed, and the disturbing image of the Harpy that became a part of her identity. The novella spirals into a series of episodes exploring the intricacies of a marriage that is in peril and how two people begin to survive each other with every passing day. The author amazed me with her writing style. The narration of Lucy was enhanced by the author’s spectacular writing, the rhythmical announcements of pain, grief and anger. I could actually feel the feel rage and anxiety the narrator felt by the magnificent language used by the author. However, I did feel reading a little of Jake’s side of the story could have lent the novella something that would offer more nuance and meaning which was ignored in the text.

The Married Harpy

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