Her

A fabulously creepy thriller

By: Harriet Lane

Narrated by: Julie Maisey

Two women; two different worlds.
Emma is a struggling mother who has put everything on hold.
Nina is sophisticated and independent - entirely in control.

When the pair meet, Nina generously draws Emma into her life. But this isn't the first time the women's paths have crossed. Nina remembers Emma and she remembers what Emma did.

But what exactly does Nina want from her
And how far will she go in pursuit of it

Read by Julie Maisey

(p) 2014 Orion Publishing Group©2014 Harriet Lane

Critic reviews

Lane ratchets up the apprehension with a maestro's skill we first saw in her debut, Alys Always.. Read it: everyone else will be. (Sophia Martell)

a terrific, subtle thriller with delicious echoes of Patricia Highsmith and F Scott Fitzgerald

The exquisitely sinister psychological thriller that is going to take us all by storm this summer, Harriet Lane's Her, has a Notes on a Scandal-type relationship between an exhausted young mother and her rich sophisticated neighbour. (Amanda Craig)

Harriet Lane's Alys Always was one of the most memorable fictional debuts of recent years, a seemingly simple story that discovered subtle ways to unsettle, and which found elegant, disturbing insights into familiar English obsessions with class and status. Lane's new book, Her, due in June, promises to be this year's unmissable summer novel. Among Lane's antecedents is the pin-sharp prose of Patricia Highsmith (Tim Adams)

Deliciously nasty, Her belongs to an emerging "women beware women" sub-genre indebted to Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Yet it is distinctive in its domesticity and its missing formulaic elements: a violence-free psychological thriller in which the victim doesn't even know there is a threat (John Dugdale)

tautly written psychological thriller... there is forensic social observation here. Her London is recognisably real. Both Emma and Nina feel like women you might pass on a leafy Islington street. She has a sharp eye for telling detail... Then the endgame, when it comes, is shattering.

Icicle-sharp... This is psychological bait-and-switchery to put on the shelf alongside Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon (Jan Stuart)

Lane's writing shines a spotlight on life's domestic flotsam. Lego under the fridge, damp laundry, crumbs in the toy box: these details of middle-class parenthood are picked out in Hitchcockian detail, gathering weight, promising imminent horror. Lane's first book, Alys, Always, was one of the most talked-about thrillers of 2012, a psychological drama exploring deceit and manipulation. Her is another study of spiteful female friendship, unwinding slowly and subtly over a year... Lane's writing is always careful and elegant, loaded with significance and often beautiful (Charlotte Runcie)

a new generation of female suspense novelists - writers like Megan Abbott, Tana French, Harriet Lane and Gillian Flynn... are redefining contemporary crime fiction with character driven-narratives that defy genre conventions.

As seductive as it is chilling, Her is quality literary fiction meets psychological thriller, the devil of which is in the detail (Lucy Scholes)

Brilliant. (Dennis Drabelle)

The end.. is perfectly executed, leaving you at the most excruciating moment possible - when a horrible thing is about to happen and there is nothing you, or any of the characters, can do to stop it

a terrific, subtle thriller

It's the little things....

In a chance meeting on a London street, sophisticated Nina encounters old acquaintance and harried new mum Emma. Nina has a much longer memory than Emma and begins to court lonely, forgetful and isolated Emma, 'Her', as Nina thinks of Emma: HER.

Harriet Lane's story is told in two voices, one calculating the other rather oblivious and sweet. There are no real surprises in 'Her', but in the two narratives, Lane makes you care about the finely wrought characters- she makes you hope the inevitable and cataclysmic ending can somehow be averted.
There's no fancy footwork here, no unreliable narrative, misdirection or obstrufication- just taut, excellent storybuilding through two distinct points of view. In fact, 'Her' kind of crept up on me; I was on the fence, thinking it might be a return but after a couple of hours was surprised to find myself utterly engaged.

Narrator Julie Maisey is superb as both characters, but the audio recording of 'Her' needs two distinct voices: a few times I picked up the story in the middle of a chapter and waited or rewound to figure out whether it was Nina or Emma's narrative.

Despite the misjudgment in production, 'Her' ranks somewhere near the top of the 400+ books in my library.