A Child's Book of True Crime

byChloe Hooper

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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.

Utterly beguiling

Guardian

About Chloe Hooper

Chloe Hooper’s first novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She has written lauded nonfiction about Australia, including The Tall Man which follows the investigation of an Aboriginal man’s death in custody, and The Arsonist, the investigation of a deliberately lit wildfire. Most recently she has co-authored, with Helen Garner and Sarah Krasnostein, The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial; it is forthcoming later this month from Text Publishing in Australia and Weidenfeld & Nicholson in the UK.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781446419540
  • Length: 240 pages
  • Price: £5.99
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