I absolutely devoured this in an afternoon.

I loved Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From so I was really excited to read this.

The Harpy is a quiet book, but with an undercurrent of dread. You know from the opening that Lucy is performing an injury to her husband, Jake, and later discover this is one of three acts of pain she is “allowed” to inflict on him as penance for his extra-marital affair.

Megan Hunter’s writing is so compelling it is almost slippery. I knew as soon as I started this book I would read the whole thing in one sitting. I just couldn’t stop reading. It’s lyrically beautiful too - her balance of these two elements in her writing is incredible. Moments feel both nuanced and wholly-realised.

This is a quick read but at no point did I feel myself rushing. Instead I wanted to savour each word - I wish there had been more.

I fell in love with Megan Hunter’s lyrical prose in The End We Start From but for me, this domestic, yet occasionally mythic, dark and horrific plot is very much my wheelhouse.

The tug and pull of married life taken to extremes.

Lucy receives a call from a man claiming her husband, Jake, is having an affair with his wife. Confronted, Jake strikes a bargain with Lucy: she can hurt him three times in return.

Hunter gets into her character's head, musing on marriage, parenting, and being parented. She wisely limits the word length, leaving the reader wanting more.

Not fond of excessive use of italics.

A satisfying, if mildly disturbing read.

Lucy has been obsessed with harpies since a childhood book first introduced her to the idea. The novel tells us the story from her first person perspective; her husband has cheated and to even the score they agree she can hurt him three times.

I am very much of the opinion that once you've cheated the relationship is finished. Not that old 'once a cheater always a cheater' though, I do believe leopards change their spots for the right person. So to me right from the start I have zero respect for Lucy for not booting that jackass husband out the door... but then that would be a short and pointless story.

The writing gives a claustrophobic, sinister atmosphere to the book, and Lucy seems to thrive, if not enjoy that type of environment. I imagined the house to be small and dingy, like a place with the curtains permanently closed.
There's something desperate and broken in Lucy and their agreement has given her a sick kind of power over her husband.

The pace ramps up as we follow Lucy's swift descent and I have to say I'm glad the book was a short one because it was not for me. Not at all.

The Harpy is a novella about the drabness and dullness of middle-class marriage, female rage, and revenge. This would be a good pick for a book club.

The plot follows a middle-class British couple, Lucy and Jake. Jake is a university researcher and Lucy has abandoned her PhD to be a stay at home mother. She has been obsessed with harpies since childhood. The plot is easy to summarise: she finds out Jake is cheating on her, and they make a fairy-tale deal: she will be permitted to ‘hurt’ Jake three times.

I liked the author’s previous book but didn’t love it. I felt the same about this one. I think it is very hard to write about domestic life - you know, your basic "Revolutionary Road" existence - boring shit sex, obsessive cooking and grocery shopping, skincare routines, judgemental playground mothers, and most memorably, children’s birthday parties where God forbid you don’t give them shitty plastic costumes to wear, or vegetables on plates that only the snobby vegetarian kid eats. These bitchy parts were really fun to read. It sounds (forgive me) absolutely soul-killing and no wonder poor Lucy is going out of her fucking mind. I thank God my bohemian hippie parents raised me unconventionally, as this book (along with Richard Yates, and Pete and Trudy Campbell’s marriage on Mad Men) makes me VERY FUCKING AFRAID about having children.

A verbal tic in the book is to refer to the cliché depiction of affairs, as the narrator frequently imagines how a woman in a film would react, in the same situation. “All those stupid, broken, fictional couples on television, not even able to find their own original language. And here we were.” It’s a clever move on the part of the book, to openly acknowledge a problem: writing about adultery is tough because it’s a topic that’s been done to death. I’m not sure if the novel completely escapes from the issue just by acknowledging it, though.

My main critique of the novel is that I wish it had been a bit more surprising. Even the three acts of revenge chosen by Lucy felt a bit paint-by-numbers - things you would expect someone to do as revenge. What if she had chosen to do something that didn’t seem like an obvious form of revenge? Ultimately, there were lots of missed opportunities throughout this to go to deeper, darker places IMHO. Like the scene at the birthday party for the son: is the son repeating/reflecting the parents’ own tendency to violence? Or when Jake initiates sex with Lucy a few weeks after she’s publicly shamed him via work email - boy, this would have been interesting to explore - the husband enjoying his wife’s revenge on him - instead of his more typical reaction of “you’re appalling, how could you do this to me, etc.). Or when the husband of the wife Jake is sleeping meets Lucy in person - what a missed opportunity to do something dark and strange with this character! What if he and Vanessa had been doing the same kind of game, for instance? What if he and Lucy had been more strongly established as foils for each other?

Overall, a solid read that is well accomplished at what it sets out to do (i.e., tell a story about adultery). But I found myself hungering for something that felt a little less safe and less explicitly spelt-out. The last few pages of the book were what felt most alive to me - surreal and daring, like the ending of the movie "The Witch." After you transform into a harpy - become all appetite, all rage - what do you do? Where do you go?

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley.

This is quite a short book, more a novella really, which I managed to read in an hour and a half.
It is the story of Lucy and Jake, a married couple with 2 children, whose marriage begins to come apart at the seams when Lucy receives a phone call out of the blue telling her that Jake is having an affair.
Lucy has been intriuged by the myth of the harpy since she was a child, studying it to almost PHD level as an adult, and she becomes obsessed with the punishing Jake in the way that the harpies would have punished wrong doers in Ancient Greece. Part of the myth relates to how the once beautifu harpies become ugly and warped by the vengeful punishments they mete out.
Lucy is on a downward spiral and for me, the book was an allegory on the mental health breakdowns that can be brought on by extreme stress (like finding out your husband is cheating on you).
I thought the book was okay, but I wouldn't rave about it.

This was a very gripping read, I found myself racing through the last 30 or so pages. I almost wish it was longer or in particular the last part of the book was expanded, as I feel like that part is where the author really took off. The main character is deeply troubled, with themes of infidelity and abuse throughout. I sympathised with her more than I thought I would, but wish more questions were answered. Overall I recommend people check this out, it’s well written and gripping and handles the topic of marriage infidelity in a way I haven’t really seen before

I wanted to love this story so much more than I did. The focus on the mythology of the harpy by Lucy reminded me a little bit of Grief is the Thing With Feathers in a way, and it just reminded me more of how much I loved that book, and this felt a little lacking in comparison.

It was a pretty quick read (I read it in a day), and the character of Lucy is really well written and developed, but it felt to me like the story was just scraping the surface of greatness. I don’t know what could have been added, but it was frustrating to read when felt that more could have been written or expanded on to improve it as a whole. It felt like the story was 75% of the way there, and it just needed something extra to push it the rest of the way.

I rated this three stars because I enjoyed the writing style, and it started off fantastic, but by the end it kind of lost me.

Beautifully written. A captivating tale of revenge, betrayal and desperation. Lyrical prose flows off the page to encapsulate everything it is to be broken.

I read this in one sitting and found myself completely absorbed in Lucy’s trauma.

Highly recommend.

The Harpy is a novel that's very much wedded to its concept - there is no world- or character-building that doesn't fit into its central metaphor.

It makes for a quietly simmering exploration of betrayal and revenge, heavy with tension - there are some lovely lyrical passages, and striking domestic tableaux. But it also limits the parameters. I always felt I knew what was coming next. The story is never quite as compelling, quite as gothic as I hoped it could be - and therefore the magic realism of the transformation falls a bit flat.

The Harpy is a concentrated examination of its theme, clever and close if limited in its scope.

An exceptionally raw and riveting tale that consumed my mind, body and soul - I've never read anything quite like it.

In The Harpy, Megan Hunter confronts the mundane and the mythical in a plot that is sharply turned on its head. When Lucy learns of her husband's shattering infidelity, a special arrangement is agreed to even the score and save their marriage. Lucy can hurt him three times, but Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take. But as the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to an otherworldly transformation of both mind and body.

In this novel of love and betrayal, revenge and renewal, Hunter interprets the seamless, unsettling blending of mother and monster through a metamorphosis rich with female rage and myth. Told in a beautiful, lyrical prose, each sentence spoke volumes and imbued a signature, solid flair so distinctive to Hunter, that I savoured every word, individual detail and turn of the page, unaware of the passing of time.

Also, never have I seen such a stunning book cover. It, in itself, is a masterpiece.

The Harpy is dark, twisted and a real treat. There is mythology, some very messed up human beings and an excellent creepy sense of ‘where is this going?’.
I loved it. Highly recommend.

The author captures the destruction of a relationship, fractures, splinters of glass slicing bonds, and leaving bloodied bodies in its wake. The narrator Lucy had always felt an affinity with Harpies, since encountering them in a story book as a child. Wild, mythical monsters with the head and body of a women, winged with talons like a bird. Their role to punish evildoers.
Lucy is incredibly intelligent, but lost. And the author delves into the subject of women stepping away from their degree and career to raise children. That point where they become invisible. Unseen.

This close look at a fractured marriage, made me think of swimming in the sea. The sting of saltwater finding any paper cuts, the dull, pungent smell of rotting seaweed lying in the sun. Grains of sand scouring your skin until it feels raw.
This novel reminds me in parts of the darkness in SALT SLOW, and THINGS WE SAY IN THE DARK, so if you've loved them I would highly recommend this!

This is a very short novel and easy to read in no time at all but there is quite a lot packed into so few pages. Whatever your thoughts on The Harpy, I highly recommend you stay the course till the end. It is truly mind bending. This book is like a prism, bending the light. At times, it is high fantasy with a mythical harpy swooping and terrifying. Other times Lucy is just an unremarkable everywoman, a mother lost in the mundane with all the same fears and insecurities that go along with having young children. By the end nothing is at all how it seems, to the reader or the character. I was reminded of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, hats off to Megan Hunter.

A dark and atmospheric take on infidelity. At some times the prose is sparse and dreamlike, at others it is raw and visceral. This duality is partly what makes the book so successful, you swing between feeling abject sympathy for the main character and feeling utterly uncomfortable with her. The book nods towards both the Classics and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, whilst feeling like it has something new to express about the ‘wronged woman’.

I think this is superb. I have not read the author's first novel, but the quality of the writing in The Harpy is first-rate. Every sentence is a poetic gem (and that cover is insanely good). I found the character of Lucy, a mother of two boys and freelance copy-editor in a small university town (almost certainly Cambridge) easy to relate to - she is spinning her wheels even with the copy-editing jobs she manages to get, and has little to focus on but her family, but clings onto her former academic life and her former subject of research, the harpy of the title.

When her husband betrays her trust, and there are some suggestions that this continues, the two of them enter into an agreement where Lucy gets to dole out punishment to him (humiliation and in two cases, forms of physical violence). I suppose this is not for the faint-hearted and the ending (where Lucy transforms into the harpy, it seems) felt like a bit of a reach - but the prose is incredible and keeps you going, even when you don't always agree with how the characters are choosing to handle the situation they find themselves in.

To elaborate on that last point, while I'm sure no one would think what these characters do is a healthy response - whether that means the major or minor characters, both of whom behave in unexpected and dysfunctional ways - to me this highlights an uncomfortable truth, that there is no 'good' way of dealing with infidelity and we continue as a society to delude ourselves that whether we are men or women, betrayed or betrayer, we can somehow 'win' at this traumatic situation. I wouldn't do what Lucy does, but the sooner we shed this damaging myth, the better.

I’m afraid I found this very strange and weird if I’m honest. I hated the female character and now understand why it’s called harpy. Not one for me I’m afraid. I struggled to read it and it was very unsettling to read about a woman so hellbent on revenge.

** spoiler alert ** I found this quite an unsettling read,which means a memorable one.
When Lucy finds out her husband is having an affair,to all outwards appearances,she just carries on with life.
But she demands revenge,three times.. and when the first leaves her husband poisoned,you wonder how far she will take it.

I have to admit,I didn't like Jake,or at least not his attitude when he was found out... almost as if he blamed Lucy for still being upset.

By the end though,I was left wondering if this would be enough.. what might she do next.

Definitely something different. (

"I lift the razor and a fairy-tale drop of blood escapes from under the silver."

Megan Hunter’s debut novel “The End We Start From” was a ruthlessly pared back and fragmentary novella/prose poem, set in a dystopian future where London is submerged by unexpectedly catastrophic sea level rises just as the female narrator gives birth. It was woven through with italicised excerpts from mythological and religious texts around creation/flood and end times. It was a haunting book as well as an oblique meditation on the physicality of being a mother.

This her second novel has many links to the first.

The book still contains a meditation on motherhood, although the narrator and her circle of friends and colleagues have moved beyond the physicality of the first book – albeit into a period with its own challenges, particularly of thwarted career ambitions:

"But few of us had babies or even toddlers any more, and we spoke of those days with the kind of quiet reverence that elderly people use to speak about the war, our eyes misting over with the memory of the atmosphere, the breathy physicality, the murky blending of space and time. Now most of us had careers that were still on hold or had moved, somehow, to a forever part-time, lower-waged track. We were still many years away from the trickle of divorces that would begin just as our children became teenagers, their rebellions reminding us, in bodily, unavoidable forms, of worlds where things happened. For now, families were steady. In this place, most husbands had highly paid jobs, travelled a lot. Most wives, despite their multiple degrees, did all the school runs, counted the days until their men returned from Stockholm or Singapore."

And there are some superb lines on being a parent:

"It happened on a Friday, the boys in their last rhythm of the week, me trying to stay steady for them, a ship in dock, something you could hardly see the end of. I picked them up from school, administering snacks, absorbing shreds of their days, the wrappers from their sweets. "

The narrator of this book is Lucy Stevenson, married to Jake (a University researcher). The book effectively begins when, David Holmes, another University employee, leaves her a voice mail to say that Jake has been having an affair with David’s wife Vanessa (10 years older than Jake and a close colleague). David we are told when he calls “was careful to use surnames, for everyone. To make it official.” – of course a (I assume deliberate) contrast to the first book which had an unnamed narrator with her family known only by initials.

And interestingly whereas the first book is explicitly set in London, this one is in an unnamed University City (which seems to be Cambridge, although left vague as to whether it could also be Oxford).

Lucy was aware David was close to Vanessa but had dismissed an affair, assuming she was safer than David spending time with young graduate students and happy to take his late night working as an excuse to have some me-time, but now

"I watched a wave of my own ignorance gathering at the edge of my thoughts, low, like tsunamis seemed to be from a distance, threatening to overtake everything."

An image which with its idea of an impending flood, links to the first book, and to Lucy’s increased obsession with disaster.

Like the first novel the book draws heavily on mythology – but in this case one basic myth – that of the Harpy, a myth image which has fascinated Lucy since childhood

"When I was a child, there was a book – out of print now, expensive – about a unicorn who went into the sea and became a narwhal. The book had beautiful illustrations, dark blue seas, peach-pale evening skies. But the picture I remembered best was of the harpies, dark shadows, birds with women’s faces, who came down to torture the unicorn, to make him suffer. I asked my mother what a harpy was, and she told me: they punish men for the things they do."

And which later became the subject of her study and research.

Desperate to placate Lucy, Jake suggests that she takes physical revenge on him – and the two agree that she can inflict damage on him on three occasions (three picked for its religious echoes – again linking to the first book).

And the Lucy I feel explicitly draws on the legend of the Harpy for her three -fold revenge: the Harpy’s role in the story of King Phineus of Thrace in spoiling the food in a feast; the Harpy’s role in stealing possessions (in this case a phone and then an academic career) and the Harpy’s role in torture (particularly of those who have killed their own family).

Over time the book gathers depth in a number of ways: Lucy’s revenge becomes more dramatic in its consequences; we learn more of her past hurts and realise her revenge is not just on Jake and recent hurts, but a much longer period of hurt and stored up vengeance; we explore the themes of forgiveness against vengeance, of contrition against guilt – and most powerfully how over time society has mythologised female justice as being more unacceptable (and more importantly unnatural) than male transgressions; the book takes on more fantastical tones as Lucy more fully grows into her role as avenging harpy.

As the opening quote implies, this is a razor-sharp novel – using fantasy to explore its themes.

Recommended.

The Harpy, Megan Hunter

Review from Jeannie Zelos book reviews

Genre: General Fiction, Literary Fiction.

I love quirky, unusual reads and this book promised that.
The writing was mostly beautiful, but at times I felt it was a bit overdone, almost took away from the intent by the wordy descriptions. Even of simple things like the pasta sauce....and that for me took away the richness and importance of other parts.
I didn't like Jake, not that we really got to know him. Right from the fist I felt he had more remorse about being caught out than for the actual affair. He was concerned too about the effects of an action on Vanessa, the lady he cheated with, when I felt it should be Lucy he worried about.
Lucy is strange, I feel her childhood wasn't happy, with a father that beat her mother and she seemed to accept it, leading Lucy to feel that it was usual in a marriage. Then there's her childbirth problems, that left her with some deep issues. I felt that maybe she still had an underlying Post Natal depression that wasn't recognised.
Of course The Harpy – she was fascinated by them as a child, ( I too adored Greek and Roman mythology) and that's persisted as an adult. Now though it feels a bit as if she identifies herself as one, doing the punishment to a man who has done wrong. Her mother described them that way, and Lucy's depression/grief over the affair has turned inward and it feels as if she things The Harpy – her alter ego perhaps – has the answers and can make everything right.
We can see that though she appears confident and happy, she's very much not so. Her inner thoughts are rambling much of the time, making excuses and wondering why she isn't reacting as others do, as TV shows have taught her. She's almost playing a role, trying to fit who she thinks she should be rather than just Being. I really felt sad for her.
That ending....perfect.
Its a story that had me wondering why, how, who, what would happen if, and of course what really happened at the end. Its very disquieting in parts, but it gave me lots to think about. Its a shortish read but even so parts felt unnecessary, the minutiae of food, chores, day to day stuff that seemed superfluous. I began to skip over sections, to get to what was actually happening. Quite a discomforting read, no particularly nice characters.


Stars: Three, its a strange read at times, not really my usual genre but I like to dip out sometimes into something different. Its not a story I'd reread, though I'm glad I read it.

Arc via Netgalley and publishers

The Harpy by Megan Hunter is about a woman whose husband cheats on her and her reaction to that. I enjoyed it because I like the way she writes but not as much as her debut.