A Child's Book Of True Crime - Softcover

"Utterly beguiling" (Guardian)

"It is difficult to believe that this clever, creepy tale is Chloe Hooper's first novel... Its originality and ambition make it a deeply impressive debut" (Sunday Telegraph)

"A finely calibrated meditation on a young woman's awakening to her sexual powers and to the violent undercurrents of Australian history" (Scotland on Sunday)

"Intriguing and resonant... Hooper succeeds where far more seasoned writers often fall short... she forces open her material and she does this with a curiosity and an instinctive grace" (New York Times Book Review)

"This book will win prizes. It will be made into a film. But most importantly it will enthral millions of people worldwide. A true classic" (Daily Mirror)

Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted pupil, Lucien. Unnervingly, her lover's wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime novel about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress. Suspecting the adult account of Black Swan Point's murder to be wrong, Kate imagines her own version of the novel, for children, narrated by Australian animals. But has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress?

Compelled by the lives of her nine-year-old students, Kate is a misfit among their parents. And though, in scenes of escalating eroticism, Lucien's father brings her to life sexually, he does nothing to penetrate her obsession with the past. Kate is fixated on the crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present.