Description
Book Synopsis'Brilliant' SUNDAY TIMES
'Compelling and unnerving' SPECTATOR
**A NEW STATESMAN Book of the Year 2023**
This first collection of stories by Lawrence Osborne perfectly showcases his talent for tension, atmosphere - and characters out of their depth
A naïve young linguist sent to the forests of Irian Jaya is manipulated into betraying her mission by a ruthless and disturbed pastor. A deaf girl hired as a maid by a wealthy New York couple turns the tables on her obliviously abusive employers and answers blackmail with blackmail. A psychiatrist treating a girl in rural England becomes ensnared in a love affair that threatens to destroy her career; while a young couple on holiday in Oman accidentally witness a killing, which leads to their being hunted as well. An entomologist at a remote hotel in the Andamans survives a tsunami and uses a dead body to further her study of ants.
Collected here for the first time, Lawrence Osborne's stories, like his novels - 'elaborate and intricately plotted dances macabres' (The Times) - feel like nightmares set against calmly and meticulously observed backgrounds. With their nods to Daphne du Maurier and Roald Dahl, these nine long-form stories explore characters lost in the shadowed borders between the mundane, the fantastical and the violence of the natural world.
Trade ReviewBrilliant... clear but strong, full of mood and meaning -- Bryan Appleyard * SUNDAY TIMES *
Compelling and unnerving -- Emily Rhodes * SPECTATOR *
If you appreciate stories with stings in the tail, you will enjoy this
fiendishly cunning new collection... Osborne not only has the knack of keeping readers guessing, but the rarer gift of drawing them into the interior world of his characters * Mail on Sunday *
Graham Greene praised Patricia Highsmith as “the poet of apprehension”, and there is something of Highsmith in Osborne’s vision of the treacherous uncertainty of human fortunes, but he has a cooler eye. “Ghost”…is
one of the most unsettling pieces of writing I’ve ever read * NEW STATESMAN, *Books of the Year* *
This is stylish, subversive fiction from
a writer at the top of his game * NEW STATESMAN, *Books of the Year* *
