The Housekeeper
  • Published: 2 June 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099502494
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $19.99

The Housekeeper

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A page-turning thriller and a stunning tale of love and loss in wintry rural America.

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

When Jamie Hall finds a boy tied to a tree and cuts him loose, she can have no idea of the desperate chain of events her act of humanity will trigger.

An orphaned teenage runaway who has fetched up with only her dog and her backpack in the lonesome town of her grandparents' birth, Jamie becomes housekeeper to Margaret, a retired photographer. There she meets Galen, a trapper who now lives at a remove from life. Slowly, they come to realise that each has something the other craves. But when the feral boy released by Jamie sets out on a lethal spree, their dreams come under terrifying threat...

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
  • Published: 2 June 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099502494
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

Melanie Wallace

Melanie Wallace was born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, and now lives with her husband in Myloi, an agrarian village below the Ohi mountain range in Greece, and in Paris. Her novel The Housekeeper was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Also by Melanie Wallace

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Praise for The Housekeeper

The most literary of thriller writers, Melanie Wallace is not one to let a story get in the way of a finely crafted pored-over sentence. In many ways, the tense, thick and dark prose in The Housekeeper is almost painterly, painstakingly setting the scene of a savagely wintry, rural America

Metro

The poetic prose and bleak setting are impressive

Literary Review

Wallace has a spark of warmth and can be very moving

The Times

A story of pursuit, loss and redemption

Daily Express

Wallace dares to suggest that even when terrible things are happening, there is always some speck of humanity, and of beauty, somewhere

Margaret Forster