In My House - Hardcover

Hourston, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571316662 ISBN 13: 9780571316663

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2015

Synopsis

Maggie lives a life of careful routines and measured pleasures. But everything changes when, walking through Gatwick a few days shy of her fifty-eighth birthday, a young woman approaches her and whispers a single word: ‘Help.’

Maggie responds, and in that moment saves a stranger, earning Anja her freedom and ensuring the arrest of a brutal trafficker.

But when the story gets picked up by the papers, Margaret is panicked by the publicity, as well as the strange phone calls she begins to receive.

Meanwhile Anja makes contact. She wants to thank her rescuer, but quickly insinuates herself into Maggie’s life.

As her relationship with Anja intensifies, Maggie begins to reveal, in increments, what it is she has been hiding. As a picture of her past takes shape, we are drawn into a slippery moral maze in which every choice is compromised. Maggie’s account is faithful, but she will keep you guessing about what really happened until the very end.

About this title

Product Description

In My House

Review

This stunningly accomplished first novel whips along like a thriller, and presents the reader with one more dilemma after another ... A must for the intelligent book group. Source: Kate Saunders, The Times

Involving and original ... Hourston resolutely avoids the predictable, skilfully throwing the reader off-balance and creating a compelling sense of unease that shimmers unsettlingly beneath the ordinary lives she explores ... a strikingly promising debut. Caustically perceptive, wryly funny, occasionally devastatingly tender, Maggie Benson is a terrific protagonist; like all the most satisfactory characters in fiction, she is both infuriatingly contradictory and entirely plausible. Source: Guardian

A slow burner that delivers in a most satisfying way. Source: Fanny Blake, Woman & Home

What would you do if you were in a toilet queue at Gatwick and someone mouthed the word, 'help'? So starts Hourston's intriguing debut novel before grabbing your hand and running headlong to its unsettling finale. Source: Stylist

The most original, well-observed and well-sustained first novel I've read in a long time. Alex Hourston has a really cool, unnerving way with words. It's crammed full of small, terrifyingly honest details which you feel ought to be in novels but rarely are. I loved it! Source: Julie Myerson

'Unsettling ... with a very persuasive thread of menace.' Source: Observer

'An unsettling story about the friendship between a lonely older woman and an Albanian teenage girl she rescues from a trafficker at Gatwick airport. So accomplished, it's hard to believe this is Alex Hourston's first novel. Source: Good Housekeeping

With unflinching coolness and a voice vice-grip strong, you have no choice but to listen to Maggie as she tells her story. Source: Sainsbury's Magazine

Full of the most dazzling observations which, as a writer, I wish that I'd had myself. Source: Allison Pearson

An unsettling but powerful story about family breakdown and urban loneliness. Source: Sunday Mirror

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0571316662
• ISBN 13: 9780571316663
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304