The Housekeeper

The Housekeeper

by Melanie Wallace (Author)

Synopsis

When Jamie Hall finds a boy tied to a tree and cuts him loose, she can have no idea of the desperate chain of events her act of humanity will trigger. An orphaned teenage runaway who has fetched up with only her dog and her backpack in the lonesome town of her grandparents' birth, Jamie becomes housekeeper to Margaret, a retired photographer. There she meets Galen, a trapper who has done a stretch inside and who now lives at a remove from life. Slowly, they come to realise that each has something the other craves. But when the feral boy Jamie releases, mute and crazed from all he has endured, sets out on a lethal spree, he is stalked by Harlan, a dangerously unhinged poacher who was once a childhood friend of Galen. As Harlan persuades himself that Jamie is sheltering the boy, these various stories of loss, redemption and pursuit become shackled together, and Jamie's hard-won chance of security is plunged into peril. Tense, passionate and unflinching, "The Housekeeper" is a novel of immense tenderness and relentless momentum.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Published: 04 Jan 2007

ISBN 10: 1846550211
ISBN 13: 9781846550218
Book Overview: A page-turning thriller and a stunning tale of love and loss in wintry rural America.

Media Reviews
Beautifully written. . . . Wallace's prose is lush and spare, and she handles both the grotesque and the gorgeous with equal skill. -- Publishers Weekly Adroitly mixing descriptions of the exterior landscape's harsh beauty with evocations of her characters' interior lives, Melanie Wallace has produced a spare, gripping novel that ventures into the territory of first-rate literary fiction. -- Wall Street Journal Harsh and lyrical. . . . The landscape is one of Wallace's main accomplishments here. The description of the old mill town Dyers Corner [is] thick with detail that never lets up. --Esquire.com
Author Bio
Melanie Wallace was born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, and now lives with her husband in Myloi, an agrarian village below the Ohi mountain range in Greece, and in Paris.