Laura Wilson
Hardback
Orion
(2003) |
|
Hello Bunny Alice
I had the dream again last night. I’m at the bottom of a lake looking through the window of a car. Everything’s green and murky and there’s a skeleton behind the wheel, dressed as a Bunny Girl. The ears are perched on the skull, jaunty, the collar and bow tie are hanging round the neck vertebrae and the body’s dressed in the satin costume -black, the colour we all used to want because it was slimming - with two empty cone-shaped cups sticking out in front of the ribcage . . .
In 1967 Bunny Girl Alice Jones met Lenny Maxted - one half of the brilliant comic duo, Maxted and Flowers - and fell deeply in love with him. But, like so many great comics, Lenny had a dark side. Their love affair ended when Alice found his body hanging from a beam in a Wiltshire cottage.
Seven years after his death, in the long, hot summer of 1976, Alice is leading a quiet, almost reclusive life in an Oxfordshire farmhouse when, out of the blue, Lenny’s partner, Jack Flowers, turns up on her, doorstep. Alice has not seen him since Lenny’s funeral, but her surprise and pleasure turn into an all too familiar sense of unease when she discovers that he is distressed and drinking heavily. At the same time a car containing human remains is fished out of a Wiltshire lake...
Laura Wilson’s fourth novel is her most powerful, intense and frightening work to date, and confirms her reputation as a writer of outstanding, original talent.
‘Wilson effortlessly moves into the exclusive Rendell, Walters and Fyfield club’ Guardian
Praise For Laura Wilson
`Brilliantly imagined . . . What’s intriguing about this, her third novel, is hearing a writer find and exercise more and more her true voice. It is distinctive, confiding and truthful. It is, thrillingly, like no one else’s’ Philip Oakes, Literary Review
`What’s most impressive about this dark, disturbing book is the considerable skill with which Wilson tells the story through several voices. Her portrayals of flawed and dysfunctional people are skin crawlingly real’ - Peter Guttridge, Observer
`Takes the reader back and forth between a menacing present and a terrible past. The writing is graceful and intelligent, all the characters are well presented and distinct and one puts the book down eager for the next’ Donna Leon, Sunday Times
`The gradual reconstruction of missing years makes compulsive reading. The author has an ear for dialogue and a gift for creating believable characters. This is real class’ Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph
`A cunning book. It creeps up on the reader like someone pursuing a friend down a street with a view to patting them on the back and saying hello but instead giving them a heart attack . . . a deceptively simple and compelling tale where pathos is the fuel for real suspense’ Frances Fyfield, Sunday Express
`A spellbinding and atmospheric tale . . . with the ventriloquist skill of the truly imaginative writer, she gets under the skin of her narrators to produce a haunting tragedy of damaged and distorted lives’ Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News
| Paperback - Orion (2002) |
 |
|
First British Edition Orion (2001) |
|
My Best Friend
A quiet Suffolk village, 1944
Fourteen-year-old Gerald Haxton is a lonely boy who regards his still-born twin brother Jack as his only real friend. His mother, a famous children’s writer, guards Jack’s memory jealously, claiming him as the model for the boy detective in her series of adventure stories, and Gerald, disturbed and unpopular, has no hope of ever measuring up to him. Playing in the woods near his home, Gerald discovers the body of his elder sister buried in a shallow grave. She has been beaten to death with a wooden stake and her boyfriend, a young G.L, is hanged for the crime.
London, 1995
As the country prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of VE Day, Gerald, who remains a loner, is nearing retirement. Obsessed by routine, he still talks to his dead brother, Jack. Surrounded by nostalgic artefacts at the TV prop-hire company where he works, he is constantly reminded of the past, and with it, his sister Vera’s death. Hoping to escape his lonely existence, he takes to following Mel, the twelve-year-old daughter of a colleague. A few days later Mel, who bears a striking resemblance to Vera, disappears . . .
'What's intriguing about this, her third novel, is hearing a writer find and exercise more and more of her true voice. It is distinctive, confiding and truthful. It is, thrillingly, like no one else's' Literary Review
`What’s most impressive about this dark, disturbing book is the considerable skill with which Wilson tells the story through several voices. Her portrayals of flawed and dysfunctional people are skin-crawlingly real’ Peter Guttridge, Observer
`Another of Wilson’s brilliantly imagined, well-rendered time slips ... Wilson is precise and unsentimental with her period details, and writes movingly about squandered lives and opportunities lost and reclaimed’ Philip Oakes, Literary Review
`The ability to draw characters that have such depth, such life, is a gift, and Laura Wilson possesses it in abundance’ J. Wallis Martin, Crime Time
`All the personalities are sharply drawn and the sense of inevitable doom slowly builds up as the story unfolds. The writing is spare and without a wasted word. This book has real class’ Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph
`Should Laura Wilson ever give up writing (heaven forbid), she could have a glorious career as a ventriloquist. My Best Friend uses multiple voices, all perfectly pitched, to tell the story . . . It’s a delight to find that Wilson lives up to the great promise of her first books’ Donna Leon, Sunday Times
`The plot is expertly developed, the writing fluent and the suspense builds effectively. Wilson creates a past that is precise and vivid but her unquestionable strength lies in getting right inside each character’s head, creating unique and fully realised voices’
Cath Staincliffe, Manchester Evening News
`Assaults on young girls 50 years apart link the strands of an engrossing, subtle and observant tale in which all the characters are delicately and convincingly drawn, even the most minor ones. Laura Wilson is a young novelist from whom the best is probably yet to come and when it does it will be stunning’ Mike Ripley, Birmingham Post
`A marvellous novel . . . serious while, at times, hilariously funny and deals with horrific acts but never takes the easy way out of attributing them to horrific characters . . . all the characters are quite astonishingly real and full’ Mat Coward, Morning Star
`Intricately constructed suspense thriller ... The events and details of My Best Friend are often grim, but Ms Wilson’s masterly presentation of them (through a half dozen pitch perfect voices) makes for compulsive reading. And even her gritty vision of life affords her troubled characters the possibility of a sort of redemption’ Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal
`My Best Friend . . . is a deeply unsettling and cunningly written psychological thriller, sure to please fans of Barbara Vine or Minette Walters’ Adam Woog, Seattle Times
|
First British Edition Orion (2000) |
|
| Paperback - Orion (2000) |
 |
Dying Voices
A chilling, atmospheric second novel by the acclaimed author of A Little Death.
When Dodie Blackstock, only child of multi-millionaire Wolf Blackstock, was eight, her mother was kidnapped. The family's attempts to get her back ended in disaster, and her body was never found. Now Dodie is twenty nine, and her mother's body has just been discovered. She has been dead for only forty-eight hours.
Alone with her memories at the Blackstock's stately home, Camoys Hall, Dodie tries to piece together the fragments of her mother's past, but first she must come to terms with the anger she still feels for her father whose vast fortune she has now inherited. She must make up her mind whether she can trust Jimmy, a local man who appears to have her best interests at heart. Most importantly she must find out who it is who knows where she lives and is sending her anonymous and threatening letters; who is now prowling the dark grounds of Camoys Hall, watching her every move…
‘Like her stunning debut, A Little Death, Laura Wilson’s Dying Voices takes the reader back and forth between a menacing present and a terrible past… The writing is graceful and intelligent, all the characters are well presented and distinct and one puts the book down eager for the next’ Donna Leon, Sunday Times
‘Compulsive reading. The author has an ear for dialogue and a gift for creating believable characters. This is real class’ Susanna Yager, Daily Telegraph
‘An unusual and likeable heroine and a compelling read’ Family Circle
‘High quality thrills… at its scary best when concentrating on the sense of isolation felt and feared by the very rich. The Seventies achingly evoked’ Philip Oakes, Literary Review
|
First British Edition Oriel (1999) |
|
A Little Death
See Review by
Val McDermid
- Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
Shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger and the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original
London, 1955. The bodies of three elderly recluses are found in a house in South Kensington. In their search for the murder weapon, the police destroy vital evidence. One of the victims is former society beauty Georgina Gresham, prime suspect in the notorious murder of her husband, James, almost thirty years earlier. Beside her lie the bodies of her brother Edmund and housekeeper Ada.
For the story behind these deaths, Ada takes us back to the late 1890s, to a prosperous and beautiful country house where children - brother, sister and cousins - are playing in the garden. To a summer full of certainty about the future and one's place in life. Until the youngest child, Freddie, is found with fatal head injuries...
Told through three narrators, this is a tight, claustrophobic piece of writing so authentic, so completely in period that it's hard to believe it is not a true story.
'An intriguing mystery of three richly imagined lives' Michelle Spring
'Gripping, insidious exhumation of the secret lives of three elderly recluses... Time past evoked so strongly that you can taste it. Intelligent, absorbing and highly accomplished. "Reminiscent of Barbara Vine" claim the publishers and they could be right. But in her first novel Wilson is imitating no one. She may remind you of the best, but her talent is all her own'. Philip Oakes, Literary Review
'In her debut novel Laura Wilson weaves a spellbinding and atmospheric tale that recreates vivid pictures of period living. And with the ventriloquist skill of the truly imaginative writer, she gets under the skin of her narrators to produce a haunting tragedy of damaged and distorted lives'. Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News
'This is a cunning book. It creeps up on the reader like someone pursuing a friend down a street with a view to patting them on the back and saying hello, but instead giving them a heart attack... A deceptively simple and compelling tale where the pathos is the fuel for real suspense'. Frances Fyfield, Sunday Express
'An accomplished first novel... an evocative picture of a past era with a childhood death which remains unexplained until the final pages. A very promising debut' Susanna Yager, Daily Telegraph
'A superb first novel... Wilson masterfully captures and different voices of the three protagonists, weaves their stories together until the reader comes to understand the web of their desire, violence and lost opportunity in which they were enmeshed and in which they died. This is an exciting debut, and leaves me eager to read Wilson's next'. Donna Leon, The Sunday Times Book Review Crime Round-up
'Remarkably skilled first novel, told through three narrators flashing back from the 1950s to the First World War. Works as both a locked-room mystery and a nugget of social history. Great promise'. Mike Ripley's Crime Guide, Telegraph
‘I urge everyone toward an offbeat, literate, wonderfully imagined novel... Tightly written, completely true to period, quietly horrifying' Poisoned Pen (USA)
About The Author
Laura Wilson was brought up in London and has degrees in English Literature from Somerville College, Oxford and UCL, London. She has worked briefly and ingloriously as a teacher, and more successfully as an editor of non-fiction books. She has written history books for children and is interested in history, particularly of the recent past, painting and sculpture, uninhabited buildings, underground structures, cemeteries and time capsules. She lives in London with a basset hound.
Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.
Hello Bunny Alice
(
2003)
Apr 03
My Best Friend
(Orion,
2001)
Orion Pbk Jul 02
Dying Voices
(Orion,
2000)
Orion Pbk Jun 00
A Little Death
(Oriel,
1999)
Orion Pbk Jun 00
Hello Bunny Alice
by Laura Wilson
