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'Harriet Said is a highly plotted horror tale that turns the "Obstinate Questionings" of puberty into deadly weapons' NEW YORK TIMES
'An extremely original and disconcerting story' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'A sharp, chilling novel . . . The ending has real shock effect' SUNDAY TIMES
A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches and encounters 'the Tsar' - almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive.
Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences.
A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge's classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written.
Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1934-2010) was born in Liverpool, where she began her adult life working as an actress--an experience she drew on when writing An Awfully Big Adventure, which was adapted into a 1995 film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, and is also available from McNally Editions. Five of her seventeen novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which garnered her the nickname "the Booker Bridesmaid"; in 2011, a special Man Booker "Best-of Beryl" Prize was awarded in her honor. Master Georgie (1998) won the James Tait Memorial Prize, and both Injury Time (1977) and Every Man for Himself (1996) were awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. Also a talented painter, she lived for many years in a house crammed with eccentric Victoriania in London's Camden Town, where visitors were forced to squeeze past the stuffed buffalo in her entrance hall.
More by Beryl Bainbridge
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