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After losing her fiancé in a shocking tragedy, Alex Morris moves from London to Edinburgh to make a break with the past. Formerly an actress, Alex accepts a job teaching drama therapy at a school commonly referred to as "The Unit," a last-chance learning community for teens expelled from other schools in the city. Her students have troubled pasts and difficult personalities, and Alex is an inexperienced teacher, terrified of what she's taken on and drowning in grief.
Her most challenging class is an intimidating group of teenagers who have been given up on by everyone before her. But Alex soon discovers that discussing the Greek tragedies opens them up in unexpected ways, and she gradually develops a rapport with them. But are these tales of cruel fate and bloody revenge teaching more than Alex ever intended? And who becomes responsible when these students take the tragedies to heart, and begin interweaving their darker lessons into real life with terrible and irrevocable fury?
Natalie Haynes' The Furies is a psychologically complex, dark and twisting novel about loss, obsession and the deep tragedies that can connect us to each other even as they blind us to our fate.
"Starred Review. Cleverly plotted, cannily paced, and unafraid to pose questions that don't have easy answers...[an] accomplished psychological mystery." -Publishers Weekly
" Fans of Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992), Erin Kelly's The Poison Tree (2011), and Tana French's The Likeness (2008) will likely enjoy the new perspective Haynes' conversational style offers to similar material." - Booklist
"Fans of suspense fiction with depth will especially enjoy this read." - Library Journal
"Like a Greek tragedy, the tale drives inexorably toward a calamitous revelation - a revelation rather heavily foreshadowed by the title and the students' syllabus. Sharply drawn characters, damaged and raw, enrich the psychological dimensions of this angst-filled mystery." - Kirkus
"The Furies feels essential and exciting at the same time." - The Times (UK)
"A gripping first novel…impossible to put down." - Herman Koch, author of The Dinner
"A handsomely structured psychological mystery, and a moving exploration of grief." - Lionel Shriver
"...Not only a gripping, can't-stop-turning-pages thriller, but also a beautifully drawn portrait of grief and how we find our way back to life...perfectly capturing the fraught and funny rhythms of a challenging classroom. I love it." - Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles
"Gripping and elegiac, funny, and achingly sad, Haynes' tale pulls you along like a river to the falls. Hypnotic." - Joss Whedon
"I stayed up all night to finish The Furies. It's gripping and compelling, a real page-turner, written with humanity and warmth." - S. J. Watson, author of Before I Go to Sleep
This information about The Furies was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: James Betts
Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster and – according to the Washington Post – a rock star mythologist. Her first novel, The Amber Fury, was published to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, as was The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, her previous book. Her second novel, The Children of Jocasta, was published in 2017. Her retelling of the Trojan War, A Thousand Ships, was published in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020. It has been translated into multiple languages. Her most recent non-fiction book, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myth was published in Oct 2020, and reached number 2 in the New York Times Bestseller chart. Her novel about Medusa, Stone Blind, was published in Sep 2022 and Margaret Atwood liked it. So did Neil Gaiman. ...
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