The Harpy: A Novel

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About The Harpy: A Novel

Review A MILLIONS Most Anticipated Book of the Month A Best Book of Fall for ESQUIRE A VOGUE Novel Editors Recommend for Fall A LITERARY HUB 20 books that are laced with sinister magic "A beautiful, poetic account of [a] marriage, and also an insightful character study. . . . It is introspective and the prose is quietly beautiful. . . . And when it borders on a dark fairy tale, The Harpy soars."―NPR “With shades of Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell, Hunter turns in an unforgettable magical realist story of power, revenge, and transformation.”—Esquire Best Books for Fall “Hunter is more concerned with the psychic injuries we inflict on the people we love than the physical ones, and physical form, in fact, becomes something mutable and ineffable, with the figure of the harpy—a mythic creature with a bird’s body and a woman’s head—assuming increasing prominence.”—Chloe Schama, Vogue “14 Novels Vogue Editors Recommend for Fall” “Worth the anticipation…a fascinating descent into a woman scorned…Megan Hunter is a beautiful observer of the minutiae in a soured marriage; she has this way of picking up these little details, these tiny scraps, and wielding them in a way that pierces. Toggling between their dark present and the narrator’s lifelong fascination with the mythical figure of the harpy, the novel has a sinister, fairy-tale like quality. In this space, Megan Hunter has carved out a place for a woman between Virgin and Whore, a third kind of woman that claws at your insides long after you’ve shut the book.”—Katie Yee, Literary Hub “A taut horror story wrapped inside a domestic drama of two people at war with each other. A scarily satisfying read.”—Library Journal “A sleek, supernatural thriller. Lucy’s narration is irresistible…Hunter maintains suspense until the final act of her satisfactory tale.”—Publishers Weekly “The Harpy asks its readers to consider whether emotional violence can be uncoupled from its physical counterpart, and whether one can justify the other. By blurring the boundaries of the two – a mild poisoning and revenge pornography occupy the same textual category of harm – the novel sketches out the unsettling psychological terrain that can lie beneath bourgeois marital composure.”— Guardian (UK) “What’s the point of writing an unoriginal sentence? A predictable sentence? A sequence of words that has been committed to paper hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before? This seems to be Megan Hunter’s starting point whenever she sets out to write a novel. […] A big part of what makes Hunter’s writing so special is her unerring knack for describing very specific sensations in novel yet instantly-relatable ways. […] a gripping, psychologically astute account of a relationship in free-fall.”—Scotland on Sunday (UK) “Hunter [writes] viscerally and incisively about her real themes: the taboos of female desire and rage; the loss of self that comes with motherhood; and the violence inflicted on women's bodies by both childbirth and men. […] The momentum builds to a hallucinatory conclusion which sets this striking, pared-down modern myth apart from the mass of domestic noirs.”—Daily Mail (UK) “What appears to be a simple story about a wronged wife is anything but in the hands of such a talented writer. When Lucy learns her husband has been having an affair, she seeks to even the score with three acts of revenge. This contemporary fairytale is a talon-sharp look at the stultifying effect domesticity can have on women.”—Good Housekeeping (UK) “As with her debut, Hunter writes about the intricacies of motherhood with striking nuance. … This surreal, eviscerating work of fiction lays bare the drudgery of suburban marriage and delves into institutionalized gender roles.”—Irish Times “The Harpy is an almost perfect book. The premise is so simple, and the execution so flawless. It feels like a fairy tale not only because of its aura of mystery and the purity of its structure, but because the story itself is so fundamenta