Whatever You Love
by Louise Doughty
Customer Rating: 
(from 1 Member)
Category: Fiction / General
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Publication date: 7 April 2011
Number of pages: 320
Prizes:
Shortlisted for Costa Novel Award 2010.
Description:
Two police officers knock on Laura's door and her life changes forever. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed. When justice is slow to arrive, Laura decides to take her own revenge and begins to track down the man responsible. Laura's grief also re-opens old wounds and she is thrown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty's father David, their marriage and his subsequent affair with another woman. Haunted by her past, and driven to breaking point by her desire for retribution, Laura discovers the lengths she is willing to go to for love. "Whatever You Love" is a heart-wrenching novel of revenge, compulsion and desire from acclaimed novelist Louise Doughty.
What the papers say:
'In prose that is devastatingly efficient and as stark as winter branches, Louise Doughty scrutinises the riven state of the bereaved, a life of both dulled, unthinking existence and unbearable lucidity ... Novels about love and loss are ten-a-penny, but this one brilliantly defies expectations to the very last page. Unsparing, challenging and terrifically compelling.’ -- (Daily Mail).
'...an extraordinary opening, written with such taut understatement that the mother's grief is given a visceral power: we empathise with it immediately ... Whatever You Love is a masterfully constructed novel, at once gripping and tender ... The emotional power of Doughty's prose is such that the reader is complicit in Laura's journey from loss to retribution. Doughty forces us to confront the darkness that lies beneath the skin. The result is a brilliant and brutal novel that continues to unsettle long after the final page has been turned.’ -- (The Observer).
'Louise Doughty is a courageous writer, willing to explore deeper territory with each book ... Doughty is excellent at small physical details of relationships with children - their scent and skin texture, memories the body retains even if the conscious mind can banish them ... Doughty excels at conveying the harrowing grief of Laura's bereavement and her slow emergence into a world entirely changed by the death of her daughter, and skilfully handles a tense and complex plot. This is a powerful portrait of loss and its psychological consequences.' -- (The Independent).
'Brilliant, disturbing, heart-wrenching.’ -- (Daily Mirror)
Author's Biography:
Louise Doughty is the author of five novels - Crazy Paving, Dance with Me, Honey-Dew, Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle - and one book of non-fiction, A Novel in Year, based on her hugely popular Daily Telegraph column. Doughty also writes radio plays and journalism and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 4, as well as teaching for the Faber Academy. She lives in London.
In Stock: 1 copy
