Dear Thief - Hardcover

"A glorious, sensuous, grown-up novel, intelligent and passionate." (Tessa Hadley)

"Harvey has struck gold... Perhaps because it is so intimate, so honest, so raw, Dear Thief provokes you to think about life, and Life, and your own life." (Claire Kilroy Guardian)

"Beautiful... Exhilarating... Remarkable" (James Wood New Yorker)

"Compassionate, matter-of-fact and mysterious about death and its ultimate transforming... Harvey offers an incandescent vision of hope and acceptance." (Catherine Taylor Sunday Telegraph)

"A quiet, unusual book, full of sad truths. I loved this epistolary novel of friendship, betrayal and forgiveness." (Paula Hawkins, author of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN Guardian)

Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2015 Jerwood Prize

In the middle of a winter’s night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget.

Without knowing if her friend, Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night – a letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred and love.

The thoughtfulness, intensity and sheer beauty of her writing in her first two novels, The Wilderness and All Is Song, brought Samantha Harvey both huge acclaim and many prize shortlistings. Those readers who loved those novels will fall on Dear Thief with relief and delight.