Dear Thief

“You were going to work your way into my marriage & you were going to call its new three-way shape holy,” writes the unnamed narrator of Dear Thief. The thief is Nina, or Butterfly, who disappeared eighteen years earlier & who is being summoned by this letter, this bomb, these recollections, revisions, accusations, & confessions. “Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered & buried you under the patio.”

Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, & a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury & beauty about the need for human connection & the brutal vulnerability that need exposes. “While I write my spare hand might be doing anything for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach.” Here is a rare novel that traverses the human heart in original & indelible ways.

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Samantha Harvey lives in the UK & is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for The Wilderness in 2009 & shortlisted for Orbital in 2024. Harvey is also the author of the novels All is Song, Dear Thief, & The Western Wind, & a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. She has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book Award & the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize.