Fleur Macdonald

Australian Gothic

The Engagement

By

Jonathan Cape 256pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Chloe Hooper’s debut, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002. It was about a young teacher who – while pursuing an affair with a pupil’s father – becomes obsessed with his wife’s novelised account of a local murder, in which the victim’s life seems to mirror her own. In The Engagement, fact and fiction form an unequally uncomfortable marriage.

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