The Housekeeper

A page-turning thriller and a stunning tale of love and loss in wintry rural America. 
 
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Wallace has a spark of warmth and can be very moving

The poetic prose and bleak setting are impressive

Wallace dares to suggest that even when terrible things are happening, there is always some speck of humanity, and of beauty, somewhere

The most literary of thriller writers, Melanie Wallace is not one to let a story get in the way of a finely crafted pored-over sentence. In many ways, the tense, thick and dark prose in The Housekeeper is almost painterly, painstakingly setting the scene of a savagely wintry, rural America

Melanie Wallace was born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, and now lives with her husband in Myloi, an agrarian village below the Ohi mountain range in Greece, and in Athens.

When Jamie Hall finds a boy tied to a tree and cuts him loose, she can have no idea of the desperate chain of events her act of humanity will trigger. 
 
An orphaned teenage runaway who has fetched up with only her dog and her backpack in the lonesome town of her grandparents' birth, Jamie becomes housekeeper to Margaret, a retired photographer. There she meets Galen, a trapper who now lives at a remove from life. Slowly, they come to realise that each has something the other craves. But when the feral boy released by Jamie sets out on a lethal spree, their dreams come under terrifying threat... 
 
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Melanie Wallace

An exquisitely imagined novel of memory and desire, beautifully achieved, as tense as it is elegaic. This is a book that keeps faith with the landscape in which it is set, its vast spaces, great silences and strangeness

Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea

She reminds the reader of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy... visionary and extraordinary... This heartfelt novel leaves a deep and singular impression... the book's language is rich, discriminating and unconstrained

A captivating novel that looks deeply at memory and place... Blue Horse Dreaming is profound. It explores deep human emotions and the impact history has on everyday life

'Remarkable and utterly original ... Time and again, Wallace finds the one right word to lift an otherwise ordinary sentence into art'

'I will not live amongst you' are the only words Abigail Buwell will speak when she arrives at Fort 2881. She has been taken from her life among the savages and returned against her will to 'civilisation' - the last military outpost on the hellish frontier's edge in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Alone and heavily pregnant, she is watched day and night by her beloved blue roan horse. 
 
Major Cutter, the commander into whose hands Abigail is delivered, is crushed by the war and its aftermath and haunted by the ghost of a boy from his past. As the fort descends into madness and chaos, and Abigail's resistance to redemption continues, Cutter's fate and that of his silent charge are bound together.

Melanie Wallace

Praise for Blue Horse Dreaming

An exquisitely imagined novel of memory and desire, beautifully achieved, as tense as it is elegaic. This is a book that keeps faith with the landscape in which it is set, its vast spaces, great silences and strange ...

She reminds the reader of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy... visionary and extraordinary... This heartfelt novel leaves a deep and singular impression... the book's language is rich, discriminating and unconstraine ...

A captivating novel that looks deeply at memory and place... Blue Horse Dreaming is profound. It explores deep human emotions and the impact history has on everyday life

An exquisitely imagined novel of memory and desire, beautifully achieved, as tense as it is elegaic. This is a book that keeps faith with the landscape in which it is set, its vast spaces, great silences and strange ...

She reminds the reader of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy... visionary and extraordinary... This heartfelt novel leaves a deep and singular impression... the book's language is rich, discriminating and unconstraine ...

A captivating novel that looks deeply at memory and place... Blue Horse Dreaming is profound. It explores deep human emotions and the impact history has on everyday life

An exquisitely imagined novel of memory and desire, beautifully achieved, as tense as it is elegaic. This is a book that keeps faith with the landscape in which it is set, its vast spaces, great silences and strange ...

She reminds the reader of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy... visionary and extraordinary... This heartfelt novel leaves a deep and singular impression... the book's language is rich, discriminating and unconstraine ...

A captivating novel that looks deeply at memory and place... Blue Horse Dreaming is profound. It explores deep human emotions and the impact history has on everyday life

Books by Melanie Wallace

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