This is a fairly eerie book that should be read on a proper physical book and not on a kindle or anything else. It just reads that way, it's slow and pulls you in and makes you want to know what she will do next. It is worth a read and the cover is lovely. It's simplest story of infidelity and lies that gets turned into so much more.

This is short, sharp and smart (and oh, that glorious cover!) as her husband's infidelity is the catalyst for long-suppressed rage and violence to spill over in Lucy's psyche. Hunter keeps it impressionistic rather than directly linear and intimates how Lucy's upbringing as well as more institutionalised gender expectations have been seething beneath the surface. The image of the harpy works well and figures both as a symbol of feminised aggression as well as a motif that articulates self-alienation and a kind of fracturing of identity.

The writing is, however, in a style that I typically dislike: that dreamy 'poetic' prose (think Daisy Johnson or Jessica Andrews' Saltwater) that smacks of creative writing class and which can too often prioritise pretty combinations of words which, scutinised, don't stand up to much: 'the virgin blue of his notification light in the darkness' (why 'virgin blue'? Ok, I get that the notification reveals infidelity but it's a tenuous connection at best), 'the oil shimmers, gold leaf on deep red heat' (it's just a pasta sauce, for heaven's sake!). It's also hard that so much of this book is taken up with domestic minutiae: bathing the kids, making their tea (fish fingers, since you ask), picking them up from school - again, I can see that this reflects the burden of Lucy's domestic work but it's dull reading.

I suspect this could have been tautened up to make a brilliant short story - spun out to novella length it starts to sag a bit.

One day, amid the daily humdrum of chores and child-care, a phone call stirs the silence. A message is delivered. Lucy's husband is having an affair. And, just like that, or maybe long before, the harpy is awoken.

This novel was constructed in such an interesting format. Lucy, when faced with her husband's infidelity, moves through the range of emotions movies and TV shows have taught her to feel. These are experienced only at surface level and, beneath them, the only way she truly feels she can heal begins to reveal itself - three hurts for the ongoing one he has done to her.

Sequestering these scenes from Lucy's life are the movements of the harpy, a mythological being combining the features of a woman with those of a bird. These are brief and detail Lucy's childhood attachment with them, her university research reveals their journey from Greek and Roman mythology to the present, and her present predicament welcomes their arrival.

Despite the catastrophe that is played out, this is somehow still a quiet novel. It is very inwardly focused, relying on simmering emotion amongst daily suburban trivialities and small acts of vengeance which later culminate to one of staggering and unprecedented proportions.

The ending feels glaringly inconclusive, but not in an unlikable fashion. It felt fitting that the reader gets to decide whether this harpy grew her wings and took flight, or uncurled her talons for one final act against those who had wronged her.