THE BOOK OF YOU

Brilliant debut psychological thriller. In the vein of S.J. Watson and Gillian Flynn it is a story that makes the reader feel profoundly uncomfortable, whilst at the same time being unable to stop turning the pages. You don’t want to look but you just have to.

For Clarissa, being called to do Jury Service is a relief. It means she can leave work for a couple of weeks and avoid the unwanted attentions of her university colleague, Rafe. An intense man who is an expert on grisly folk tales, Rafe has always rather unnerved her, and Clarissa still cannot understand how she could have let herself have a drunken one-night stand with him. But if for her, their night together marked the end of something, for Rafe it was just the beginning and now his growing possessiveness is beginning to frighten her. As the trial unfolds and she learns of a story of violence and fear, Clarissa begins to realise that the parallels between the young victim and her own situation are all too similar. But with no crime to report and only her gut feeling to guide her she is powerless in the face of Rafe's obsession.
What can you do when the lines between fantasy and reality, love and fixation become dangerously blurred and how do you protect yourself from an enemy that no one else can see?
Cleverly constructed and with a deeply convincing and haunting narrative voice The Book of You is tinged with the darkness of a macabre fairytale, yet completely grounded in reality which only serves to make it all the more terrifying.

Tracy Brain lectures in English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She is passionate about Sylvia Plath, and has written a book on this author (The Other Sylvia Plath published by Longman in 2001). The Book of You is her first novel.