Dear Thief

Samantha Harvey, a Booker Prize winner who was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, delivers a novel about a woman's friendship, its betrayal, and the urge for revenge. Her unnamed narrator addresses a letter to Nina, also known as Butterfly, who vanished eighteen years earlier. The letter is part provocation and part reckoning, combining memories, rewritten accounts, charges, and admissions.

The narrator tells Nina that she meant to insinuate herself into the narrator's marriage and to treat their new three-person arrangement as sacred. The narrator also toys with the idea of having killed Nina and buried her beneath the patio, a claim offered with a teasing, half-serious air. Throughout, the writing shifts between tenderness and anger.

The book is at once a letter to a former friend, a song, a jewel, and a love story involving three people. Harvey explores the human need for connection and the exposed, painful vulnerability that comes with it. Readers who enjoy intimate, voice-driven literary fiction about jealousy, loyalty, and the past will find it especially rewarding.