Mapping The Edge - Softcover

Dunant, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844081761 ISBN 13: 9781844081769

Publisher: Virago, 2005

Synopsis

Anna packs her bags one day without telling anyone where and why she is going - just that she'll be back soon. Her thoughts as she boards a plane, are that this journey will give her time to think about her life - as a woman hitting forty, a journalist and a single mother. She has no premonition that she will become a statistic in a missing person file. Left at home is Anna's beloved six-year-old daughter Lily, her gay friend Paul, who is surrogate father to Lily, and her eccentric best friend Estella. When Anna doesn't return, they make uneasy excuses until, as time passes, the mind-numbing possibility that Anna might not be coming back becomes terrifyingly real. And while those closest to her battle with their imaginations, Anna is on a dark journey - in one scenario Anna is on a ravishing, sexual adventure, on the other, much darker voyage, she is the victim of a stranger's dangerous sexual fantasy. In a masterpiece of emotionally intelligent and nerve-wracking suspense, Sarah Dunant takes us to the very edge.

About this title

Review:

Journalist Anna goes missing on a trip to Italy, and all her friends and child, Lily, can do is worry, and imagine. Stella rushes back to England from Holland to help Paul look after young Lily and the pair of them have to come to terms with what Anna's permanent loss would mean.

Dunant writes well about the new tensions implicit in new sorts of family and new ways of life; Stella's free life with a semi-detached lover, Paul's relationship with the younger Mike--can these survive having to bring up a child? And what has happened to Anna? Dunant plays games and tells us two very different thrilling stories of Anna's absence. Is Anna perhaps the victim of a drugged drink, and abduction, and is locked in a remote house, a woman in Gothic danger? Or is she caught up in a more modern fantasy--off having raunchy sex with a charming but unsatisfactory lover who talks to her about art and takes her to look at rare paintings? This is an intense book, all the more effective for its every element being provisional; Dunant uses thriller elements to invigorate a novel of loss and risk. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

Part of what makes MAPPING THE EDGE so compulsive to read is that it functions with real confidence and assurance on several levels. Two thrillers are interwoven with the gradually accumulating tension of those left behind, arousing complementary anxieties and exploring the darkness at the heart of Dunant's characters (INDEPENDENT)

Dunant's fiction is trade-marked with heroines who take chances and ignore risks. Not a whiff of political correctness; the rules they make or break are all their own. The subtext of the novel - how loyalties are strained, how relationships change - is e (LITERARY REVIEW)

This is a tantalising novel, the fictional equivalent to one of those Ayckbourn or Pirandello plays in which different "realities" run parallel to each other...it is always interesting and sometimes remarkable in its stealthy creation of an atmosphere of unease, terror and mystery (SPECTATOR)

It is easy to see why Dunant chose the strategy of duelling stories - the missing, by their nature, invite multiple explanations. And she pulls off this difficult narrative trick with considerable technical skill, aided by a clean prose style and a deft (SUNDAY TIMES)

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1844081761
• ISBN 13: 9781844081769
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352