The Stopped Heart

A devastating story of loss, longing, love and true evil – the stand-out novel from the bestselling author of Something Might Happen.

This is a book that you will turn through the night to reach its conclusion — Myerson has you dying for the end and even surer that you will do just that when you get there. Spoiler alert: don’t expect roses around the door.

It’s the sort of book you cannot put down, partly because it is so addictive and partly because if you do put it down, you know you will spend the next few hours startling at every creaking door… It really is unremittingly, heart-stoppingly dark.

The German word unheimlich captures best what Myerson writes about so well: that eerie sense when something is both familiar and unfamiliar. The English word for that is 'uncanny'.

Filled with darkness… An unsettling and disturbing tale.

There’s a rhythm to these purposeful leaps between past and present that becomes part of the experience of reading this increasingly gripping novel.... The German word unheimlich captures best what Myerson writes about so well: that eerie sense when something is both familiar and unfamiliar

Myerson evokes mystery and madness, with glimpses into devastating events, the full extent of which are slowly and skilfully uncovered.

I raced through this compelling story of parental heartbreak interspersed with the unravelling a century-old crime.

The story is heart wrenching, unremittingly grisly… A thriller and…a page-turner… The Stopped Heart exposes the flesh of the lives cut in half, the pain and loves of the past, and why they are no less real than the present.

Darkness courses through Myerson’s psychological horror novel.

A brilliantly unsettling read.  Myerson’s elegant prose creates a suffocating feeling of dread as the psychological consequences of loss and violence are mercilessly revealed.

The ever enjoyable Julie Myerson has produced a haunting story of love and loss, whose mystical theme is that extreme tragedy leaves a stain that never truly dies… Gripping and moving.

A terrifying ghost story… The book is shot through with memories of abducted children…and yet it is not mawkish or sentimental. There is hope, greed, anger, compassion…. Myerson has taken us to the precipice and made us look over.

A heart-stopper: a luxuriously paced but utterly gripping tale… Ruthlessly addictive.

Interweaving a modern psychological drama with the timeline of the past, this is powerful unsettling stuff.

Heart wrenching, unremittingly grisly and packed with the ghosts of dead children… A thriller and…a page-turner.

A deeply wrought and mysterious study of a family and tragic loss.

An engrossing thriller that weaves a century-old crime around a tale of parental heartbreak.

Chilling and full of psychological suspense.

Two stories are skilfully grafted into something strange and unsettling; the author creates an atmosphere you can practically taste.

Myerson is a practiced and evocative writer.

Its compelling and brutal psychological honesty make it arguably Julie Myerson’s greatest literary achievement to date… The Stopped Heart floes like two turbulent rivers… She is a faithful and empathic recorder of the terrible depths of parental loss… Saturated in sadness, The Stopped Heart is a fine novel that will make a profound and long-lasting impression on the reader… A perfect summer read.

Gripping parallel narratives look at a Suffolk cottage’s residents.

It is so sophisticated in its emotional insights and its ingenious construction, vividly written and compelling enough to keep one hooked.

May be Julie Myerson’s best novel yet… Both a page-turning thriller and a serious examination of how abuse works… A brilliant read and anyone you give it to on Christmas Day is likely to disappear until they've finished it.

Julie Myerson’s ninth novel – alive with the corpses of dead children – is part thriller, part thoughtful meditation on grief and personal history.

So meticulously does Myerson draw these characters and so intricately does she interweave the narratives that reading the novel is like watching a film and shouting at the screen while a character fails to notice the murdered hiding under the bed. The Stopped Heart is an eerie and disquieting ghost story about the natures of male desire, teenage rites of passage and how grief can shift the prism through which we perceive both the past and the present.

Julie Myerson is the author of Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House and nine novels, including the best-selling Something Might Happen, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In the words of the Observer, she 'has a talent for making the unthinkable readable. The results are riveting.'

'Bloody brilliant' Paula Hawkins, bestselling author of The Girl on the Train 
 
Some memories are too powerful to live only in the past. 
 
 During a ferocious storm, a red-haired stranger appears in the garden of a small farming cottage. Eliza and her parents take him in. But very soon, it’s clear he has no intention of leaving. 
 
 A century later, Mary and Graham have experienced every parent’s worst nightmare. Now, escaping the memories and the headlines, they have found an idyllic new home in rural Suffolk. A cottage, a beautiful garden. The perfect place to forget. To move on. But life doesn’t always work that way. 
A devastating depiction of profound loss, sexual longing, love and true evil, The Stopped Heart is the finest novel to date from this most fearless and original of writers.

The Quickening

A honeymoon on a tropical island goes horribly wrong. A tense and terrifying Hammer novella by Julie Myerson, the author of Something Might Happen and The Story of You.

Myerson takes us into her rising levels of panic, right up to the final plot-twist ... Myerson writes with a fluidity that quickly absorbs the reader

a gripping tale ... Myerson keeps the reader guessing until the very end and provides no easy answers in a deceptively simple read that will compel horror fans while being just as satisfying to her own readership

brimming with black magic, murder and menace. Full of twists and turns, and written with subtlety and intelligence, it's a truly haunting tale written in the best horror tradition

Good things happen when writers enter the realm of the unexpected for new horror fiction from Hammer ... The pace is terrific and she keeps your pulse pounding.

a good fast read; just the thing for your next Caribbean holiday

a genuinely creepy tale from a very skilled author

Julie Myerson's novels are perfectly suited to long, drifting afternoons spent in empty houses with only the odd, atmospheric creak of pipe or groan of plank for company.

Her reputation is terrific, and she completely deserves it.

Myerson can write. Her dialogue has poise and precision, and she seldom pre-empts the reader. She also knows how to structure a narrative, so that details are revealed gradually and without prescription.

Myerson's cleverness lies in her supremely confident ability to play with structure, drip-feeding us snippets of memory yet never losing pace along the way.

One of Myerson's strength's lies in creating atmosphere... Myerson sees the pathos in small details.

Rachel and Dan want to go somewhere hot in January. 
 
Recently married and expecting their first baby, they decide on an island in the Caribbean. Why not turn it into a honeymoon, Dan says? 
 
A holiday in paradise. It ought to be perfect. Except that, for Rachel, it's not. 
 
Things take a sinister turn as soon as they arrive. 
 
As furniture shifts and objects fly around, as a waitress begs her to leave and a fellow guest makes her increasingly uneasy, Rachel realises everything she holds most dear is at stake and nothing is quite as it seems...

Then

An astonishing, apocalyptic new novel, from the author of Something Might Happen.

This is writing that takes the breath away... I cannot praise this staggeringly accomplished work highly enough

Then is a bold, uncompromising book that marks out Myerson as a truly interesting and risk-taking author... grippingly good

Julie Myerson offers a haunting twist on Armageddon... A chillingly persuasive vision of emotional hell

An addictively readable feat of imagination

Then is a devastatingly dark story, and the hypnotic quality of its writing, and the searing vision it lays before us, certainly appear to have sprung from a deep and frightening source

The eeriness of the world outside is conveyed well; as are the horrors that beset the survivors... It is highly readable and involving, offering tantalising clues as the reader tries to navigate the grisly streets of London and the dark corners of the narrator's mind...but the central human narrative is strong and clear, proving that even in darkness there are points of light

One of Myerson's strength's lies in creating atmosphere... Myerson sees the pathos in small details

At first this genre-bending novel feels like a departure for Myerson, but familiar themes kick in – injured children, broken homes, psychological torment. It’s a chilling and original portrait of breakdown

Myerson displays a deft touch at providing the reader with telling, troubling details, clues to what might have happened. Unremittingly bleak, Then is a novel about memory as a woman tries to piece together the fragments of her past

A blasted world. 
A broken heart. 
A shattering betrayal. 
 
Heartlessness has become the law. In the wasted ruins of London, a woman pieces together fragments of her memory. As her past emerges, her own apocalypse begins. 
 
Then is a novel of singular invention and bravery. With it, Julie Myerson has created an echo chamber of the heartbreaking and the terrifying, and an enduring dystopian vision.

Not A Games Person

A book for any man, woman or child who has ever suffered the agony of P.E.

An engaging study of fear and confidence in the game of life

If you wish to discover exactly how our pasts can be transformed into literature, read Julie Myerson

A wonderfully slim, toned book by the naturally and metaphorically lean Julie Myerson

The adult Myerson coaxes memories from her younger self, and the result as a gentle, subtle quality that makes this a light, yet thoughtful, read

The pictures she paints ... are so tangible you can almost feel the stinging cold of the wind whipping across a sports field and smell the unforgettable odour of school changing rooms

P.E. You either loved it or hated it, looked forward to it or dreaded it, but we've all been forced to do it. Sometimes a note could get you out of it, but the following week there you'd be again, writhing on a cold and dusty gym floor in your underwear. 
 
Skinny, timid, knock-kneed Julie Myerson was 'not a games person', according to her teachers. In this touching, funny and occasionally devastating exploration of her childhood, she now asks the question: why not?

The Story of You

The tale of a woman trying to get by as a mother and a wife while falling in love with a man from a memory, written with Julie Myerson's signature empathy and precision.

Grief isn't normally the stuff of page-turners but Myerson, in stark, simple prose - seemingly effortless, though I suspect far from it - has constructed a compelling thriller out of it... A terrific read

Achingly brilliant...a haunting and compelling tale of memory, grief and obsession

A powerful, moving study of sadness and the uncanny

This is an extraordinary, peculiar, mesmerising novel - the collected wail of middle-aged female anguish is brilliantly articulated.  Myerson is one the select few who can write convincingly about a passionate love affair, with all its exquisite pains and barbed pleasures

Julie Myerson's novels are perfectly suited to long, drifting afternoons spent in empty houses with only the odd, atmospheric creak of  pipe or groan of plank for company

An emotionally resonant study of the tricks, torments and consolations of memory, Myerson's novel poignantly surveys the bottomless well that grief leaves in people's lives

The Story of You... is an effective study of the power that people have of conjuring up what they need when they need it, and the havoc it causes to the people around them

Heartbreaking and obsessively good... A moving story

A freezing room in a student house, a sagging mattress on the floor, and two people, one nineteen, the other twenty, kissing passionately. All night. 
 
It is to this scene that, twenty years later, Rosy, the narrator of Julie Myerson's astonishing new novel, returns obsessively. She has just lost a child in a terrible, careless accident, and Tom, her partner, has taken her to Paris to forget about things, to start again. 
 
It has snowed in the night and, waking at dawn, Rosy decides to go for a walk. At the hotel desk there's a note for her: 'I'm waiting for you X.' And he is, sitting in the corner of a café she enters almost at random. They talk. He touches her. She turns away and when she looks again he is gone. 
 
Was he there? Had she dreamed him? And why, when he emails her out of the blue two days later, does he write as though they haven't met for twenty years?

The Touch

'An assured and compassionate book' - Independent on Sunday

The second novel is traditionally the testing time for writers. Myerson passes her test with flying colours

An assured and compassionate book... both eccentric and unaffected... Myerson's chosen subjects are illness and power; later, with excitingly conveyed force, suppressed love comes to join them

Frank is a creation of which Myerson can be proud - originally, absorbingly mad; by turns repulsive and engaging

Myerson is particularly interesting on the way relationships bend and adjust to fit around illness, on the nature of physical pain and the frightening, exhilarating prospect of freedom from it. She explores the meaning of miracles and the terrifying impotence of reason against rant. Myerson does all this with few words and scant detail, and yet her novel reverberates around the mind long after one has finished reading it

Myerson can write. Her dialogue has poise and precision, and she seldom pre-empts the reader. She also knows how to structure a narrative, so that details are revealed gradually and without prescription

When Donna, Will and Gayle find Frank Chapman lying bruised and battered on the ground on Clapham Common, they feel drawn to help the old man. A connection is forged between the four of them that threatens to upset the careful balance of their lives...

Out of Breath

A story told by a young girl featuring a cast of children left to make their own world. 
 
'Myerson at her best' - The Times

A sweetly corrupt exploration of the childhood fantasy of running away... Myerson is a beautiful conjurer of subtly disturbing atmospheres...haunting

A mythical rite-of-passage novel... mysterious and multi-layered

Compulsively readable and richly inventive... bittersweet, authentic and loveable

Myerson is a surefooted guide along the wobbly line that separates the real from the surreal ... Myerson captures [adolescence] beautifully in Flynn's compelling voice. The opening of the novel is crisp and immediate, the prose simple and direct ...More than just a coming-of-age story, Out of Breath is a timely reminder about the importance of not growing up too quickly

A truly original read, transcending many of the usual boundaries found in fiction

Its playful, imaginative charge is constantly undercut by the subcutaneous presence of psychological damage and the darkness that emerges as innocence gives way to experience

A brilliant, deeply unsettling thriller which promises to be among the best reads of this year

A weird, beautiful scary slice of British magic realism

Myerson is a master of suggestion and builds up the suspense layer by layer

Fans of Julie Myerson will adore this, the latest edition to Myerson's very own sub-genre within the broader class of 'novels of the uncanny'

A sinister, beguiling tale that brilliantly evokes a childhood world

Brilliant and nightmarish, this modern fairytale is beautifully written

Flynn is a thirteen-year-old girl caught between her violent, out-of-control brother, Sam, and her mother, who is struggling to cope. And then, one impossibly hot night, a strange half-feral boy called Alex turns up at the bottom of Flynn's garden. Alex is one of three runaways; there's also Diana, who has just had a baby, and Mouse, who is only six and already an accomplished arsonist. 
 
With Flynn and Sam in tow, the rag tag group of children venture into the deserted countryside, pursued by a terrifying and unseen man. Deep in the woods, they stumble across an abandoned cottage which seems to offer refuge but soon begins to reveal its dark and terrifying secrets...

Something Might Happen

'Chillingly convincing - Myerson leaves us teetering emotionally at the edge of the cliff, without a safety net' Independent

Summer reading may never be the same after Julie Myerson's latest novel...Myerson has a talent for making the unthinkable readable. The result is riveting

This is top-notch storytelling - it doesn't let go and keeps you thinking

This novel stands as her most impressively realised work to date...Myerson has a forensic interest in the messiness of grief, which she itemises with the awful clarity of vision that often accompanies shock

Mesmerising, chilling stuff; Myerson's prose is taut and precise

On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. There are no obvious suspects, she was not an obvious victim. She just wasn't, thinks her grieving, bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her. 
 
Something Might Happen is not a murder mystery. There are clues, false trails, detectives, all the paraphernalia of the whodunnit, but Myerson's concern is with the effect of the murder on an ordinary community and specifically on Tess herself, her husband Mick and her three children. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess's world of nappies, school runs and baked beans begins to unravel. Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes charged with significance, established relationships begin to crumble and places that once were safe are safe no longer.

Julie Myerson

Sleepwalking is exceptionally good... Myerson has made the most pointed comments on parenthood since Philip Larkin

Julie Myerson...tackles murky themes with grace and clarity. Her prose is nimble and springy. Her short scenes, flicking between past and present, flash before us like a deck of cards shuffled by a top-class conjurer... Myerson is the genuine article

A measured evocation of bereavement and childhood trauma

An impressive literary debut... funny and moving

An emotional, delicate, lucid and extremely likeable debut

Susan finds her year-old marriage to Alistair less than ideal. Just as she contemplates leaving him, she discovers that she is pregnant with his child. As she grapples with this news, she learns that her loathed father has killed himself. Left confused and bereft by these developments and haunted by visions of a little boy, she meets a seductive young painter and, despite knowing it could lead to crisis, begins an affair with him in her eighth month of pregnancy. 
 
Told with an eye for startling details and an unerring sense for psychological truth, this harrowing, passionate, obsessively compelling literary debut captures the reality of a young woman's inner landscape while spinning a tale that will hypnotise readers to its last satisfying pages.

Julie Myerson

Praise for Sleepwalking

Sleepwalking is exceptionally good... Myerson has made the most pointed comments on parenthood since Philip Larkin

Julie Myerson...tackles murky themes with grace and clarity. Her prose is nimble and springy. Her short scenes, flicking between past and present, flash before us like a deck of cards shuffled by a top-class conjure ...

A measured evocation of bereavement and childhood trauma

Sleepwalking is exceptionally good... Myerson has made the most pointed comments on parenthood since Philip Larkin

Julie Myerson...tackles murky themes with grace and clarity. Her prose is nimble and springy. Her short scenes, flicking between past and present, flash before us like a deck of cards shuffled by a top-class conjure ...

A measured evocation of bereavement and childhood trauma

Sleepwalking is exceptionally good... Myerson has made the most pointed comments on parenthood since Philip Larkin

Julie Myerson...tackles murky themes with grace and clarity. Her prose is nimble and springy. Her short scenes, flicking between past and present, flash before us like a deck of cards shuffled by a top-class conjure ...

A measured evocation of bereavement and childhood trauma

Books by Julie Myerson

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