The Book Collector - Softcover

Angela Carter crossed with the Scottish diffidence of Muriel Spark.

A high-wire act of a novel. Try to resist it and you can’t.

Expertly combining compelling storytelling with a cleverly constructed, elegant and metaphor-ridden style.

Haunting, strange, Kafkaesque, poetic mystery.

A gothic music video of a novel that whirls with weirdness... madly energetic ... genuinely scary.

Fractured and lucid as a dream. Creepy and brilliant.

Thompson’s gripping narrative invites the reader to solve the mystery of Burnt Island and the true purpose of Max Long’s fellowship. A dark, compelling novel with strong themes of paranoia and strange eroticism throughout.

Burnt Island is steeped in self-awareness, as a book about the process and effect of writing might be. It seems connected by literary electricity to other tales of isolation: The Shining, Pincher Martin, The Sea, The Sea.

In Edwardian England, Violet has a fairy tale existence: loving husband, beautiful baby son and luxurious home. She wants for nothing. But soon after the birth of her baby the idyll begins to disintegrate. Violet becomes obsessed by a book of fairy tales her husband has locked away in a safe. Paranoid hallucinations begin to haunt her and she starts to question her sanity. Meanwhile, vulnerable young women are starting to disappear from the nearby asylum. Soon Violet herself is interned in the asylum for treatment only to discover, on coming out, that her husband has hired a nanny while she has been away, the beautiful, enigmatic Clara. The brutality of the asylum is nothing compared to the horrors that now lie in wait.