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The Harpy

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The Harpy

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 Ltd Family Life Genre Fiction Psychological Marriage Fiction Suspense

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Critic reviews

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

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I was expecting this book to be a lot darker and focus more on the 3 ways she decides to hurt her husband. Instead she sends nude pics to his office.
This read like a boring suburban housewife story.
Hard to tell if this was supposed to be a precautionary tale about never taking someone back if they commit adultery?
And then the last chapter or so goes completely rogue! I was so confused that I was convinced I’d missed something and rewound to re listen a bit. Does she actually turn into a harpy?! If so maybe there should have been some subtle physical changes leading up to this. Or is it all a metaphor?! I have no idea.

What on earth happened at the end?!

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The premise had so much potential. The story could've gone so many places. It built up and fell flat.

The blurb creates drama the book doesn't reflect

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