The Engagement

The Engagement

by Chloe Hooper (Author)

Synopsis

Two people. How many lies? Liese Campbell has an engagement for the weekend: Alexander Colquhoun, a handsome, well-mannered farmer, is paying for her to stay at his property in remote Australia. Liese, an English architect in flight from the financial crisis, has been working at her uncle's estate agency in Melbourne, where Alexander is looking for a place to buy. The luxury apartments Liese shows him become sets for a relationship that satisfies their fantasies - and helps pay her debts. It's a game. Both players understand the rules. Or so she thinks. Across the ancient landscape they drive at dusk to his grand decaying mansion. Here Liese senses a change in Alexander, and realises a new game has begun. Chloe Hooper's riveting and provocative new novel is a psychological thriller for the modern age, an exploration of the snares of money and love and the dark side of erotic imagination. A trap has been set, but how and why? And for whom?

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 24 Jan 2013

ISBN 10: 0224096346
ISBN 13: 9780224096348
Book Overview: A gripping, provocative new novel by the acclaimed author of The Tall Man and A Child's Book of True Crime.

Media Reviews
A complex psychological thriller that draws on the rich literary history of madwomen in the attic, from Jane Eyre and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca... The Engagement is not Fifty Shades of Grey; its kicks, and kicks in the teeth, are much more subtle. -- Lucy Scholes Independent The pages fly past so quickly you almost miss the sharp turn of phrase and imagery ... Chloe Hooper's novel engages us, like Liese in Colquhoun's fantasy, in an S&M web for which we don't know the safe word. -- Fleur MacDonald Literary Review The novel has an affecting oddness all its own... I hope that some of E L James' seemingly insatiable fans chance upon The Engagement and find there is more satisfaction in its pages than in Christian Grey's whipping room. -- Alex Peake-Tomkinson Daily Telegraph The Engagement is Chloe Hooper's second novel and comes almost a decade after her well-received debut, A Child's Book of True Crime. It is a much tighter, more suspenseful work... The Engagement is compelling. -- Stephanie Bishop Times Literary Supplement Hooper ably sustains the tension, carefully deploying surprises. The isolation of the farm and the creeping shocks of the wilderness create a potent unease. The New Yorker
Author Bio
Chloe Hooper was born in 1973. Her highly praised first novel, A Child's Book of True Crime (2002), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Her Observer article about the Doomadgee case, 'Island of Lost Souls', was shortlisted for the Amnesty International Media Awards. Her last book, The Tall Man, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2009. In Australia, it won seven major literary awards.