Dear Thief

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

**FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL**

Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2015 Jerwood Prize

In the middle of a winter's night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time ago , she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget.

Without knowing if her friend, Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night - a letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred and love.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Central character Nina is missing from Harvey's third novel (following Wilderness and All Is Song), which takes the form of a long, rambling letter written to her by her estranged childhood friend. Gone for the past 18 years, Nina (or Butterfly) may now be living in Lithuania, from which her Jewish parents escaped when the Nazis arrived and to which they briefly returned before the communists took over. As Nina's backstory begins to emerge, each revelation comes as a tiny shock wave. Each illumination also sheds light on the twisty paths of the narrator's own history: her marriage and separation from her husband, the birth of her son, her work in a home for seniors and posing as a live model for art students, and her relationship with a Greek restaurant owner. VERDICT A story about a long friendship and the betrayals that tore it apart, this thoughtful meditation, interspersed with reflections on philosophy, religion, and poetry, is about the passage of time, the accumulation of memory, and the hard-won wisdom of aging. For readers of literary fiction.-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

With her eerie and arresting latest, Harvey ( The Wilderness ) gives the neologism frenemy a full-book treatment. Unexpectedly sensing the presence of a long-absent friend whose whereabouts are unknown, the unnamed female narrator composes a series of unsent letters to her after years of incuriosity you might call callous. That callousness stems in part from a legitimate grievance: the last time the narrator welcomed her beautiful and capricious friend, Nina, into her Shropshire home, Nina ended up departing with her host's husband in tow. Almost two decades later, the narrator is working in London at an elderly care home and considering whether to reconcile with her estranged husband when she begins her one-sided correspondence with Nina. Full of deflections and obfuscations, the letters recount the adversarial relationship between the more earthbound narrator and the exotic Nina, a British-Lithuanian world-traveler nicknamed Butterfly, that fragile and most temporary of creatures. Adopting various tones--lyrical, speculative, ironic, nostalgic, conciliatory, murderously bitter--the narrator reflects on the intensity of the women's bond and reveals large and small betrayals on both sides. This controlled, thrilling novel derives its power from the perversity of a friendship in which the pair is always closer when one has taken too much from the other. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Dear Thief is a dark and brooding letter, composed over the span of many months, that meanders through a formative friendship in a collection of remembrances, accusations, apologies, and explanations. Though the correspondent remains unnamed, she addresses her assertions and confessions to Nina, aka Butterfly (the titular thief), a woman whom the writer cannot decide whether to love or hate. Nina is a consummate wanderer and seeker, flitting in and out of the writer's sphere. She experiments with different religions, homes, and drugs before reinserting herself in the writer's adult life, where she leaves a lasting mark not only on the writer herself but also on her marriage and family before disappearing again. Nearly two decades later, the writer begins her missive, if not to resurrect Nina, then to at least recall their years together and perhaps to find some peace or meaning in them so that she can move forward. Harvey (The Wilderness, 2009) is an exceptionally talented author. The letter, written in beautiful prose, is mesmerizing and deftly captures the shades of jealousy, longing, and hope that color any painfully triangular relationship. Readers will be moved by this deeply emotional and introspective journey toward acceptance and, possibly, forgiveness.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2014 Booklist