With Your Crooked Heart

With Your Crooked Heart

Summary

With Your Crooked Heart is bestselling author Helen Dunmore's sixth novel.

Louise married Paul, brother to Johnnie . . .

Yet she doesn't get one man with this union - she gets two. Born twelve years apart in a one-bedroom flat in Barking, Paul and Johnnie are close: they're good at making money and make taking power look easy. But while Paul deals on contaminated land, Johnnie is adept at dealing in crime.

And when Louise's relationship with the brothers is further complicated by the birth of her daughter, Anna, it seems nothing can ever break this triangle. Until Johnnie's self-destructive streak begins to threaten them all . . .

'Rich, tense, tragic and almost unbearable reading' The Times

'Open a page at random and you're almost bound to find something gorgeous' Independent

'One of this country's most accomplished literary talents' Independent on Sunday

Helen Dunmore has published eleven novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphan; Counting the Stars and The Betrayal, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.

Reviews

  • This is Helen Dunmore at her very best
    Literary Review

About the author

Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction. Rich and intricate, yet narrated with a deceptive simplicity that made all of her work accessible and heartfelt, her writing stood out for the fluidity and lyricism of her prose, and her extraordinary ability to capture the presence of the past.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. H. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize. Published in 2010, her eleventh novel, The Betrayal, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Lie in 2014 was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, deals with legacy and recognition – what writers, especially women writers, can expect to leave behind them – and was described by the Observer as ‘the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written’. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more