This Little Dark Place

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

How well do you know your girlfriend

How well do you know your lover

How well do you know yourself

Daniel and Victoria are together. They're trying for a baby. Ruby is in prison, convicted of assault on an abusive partner.

But when Daniel joins a pen pal program for prisoners, he and Ruby make contact. At first the messages are polite, neutral - but soon they find themselves revealing more and more about themselves. Their deepest fears, their darkest desires.

And then, one day, Ruby comes to find Daniel. And now he must decide who to choose - and who to trust.

Reviews

[A] compelling psychological thriller- a terrifyingly plausible story of how everyday failures of empathy, compassion and, most of all, trust, can have fatal consequences. * The Sunday Times *
[an] elegantly creepy skin-crawler * The Guardian *
Hatch's promising debut is a short, sharp shocker that keeps you guessing to the end * The Times *
An intense, oppressive debut, with its dark climax sudden and shocking in its plausibility * Observer *
An emotionally raw and compulsively readable psychological thriller. A powerful tale of obsessive love and stealthy betrayal, full of twists that jolt you right up to the end. * Alice Blanchard, award-winning author of The Breathtaker *
AS Hatch's first-rate debut is a spare, elegantly written chiller in the true Highsmithian register. Daniel, our damaged, diffident carpenter protagonist, having served a long prison sentence, retraces the steps that led him to captivity, charting his unhappy childless relationship and gradual drift into chaos. The plot is as well turned as the cabinets Daniel makes, the narration is unreliably delirious and there's an inspired use of Brexit, first as an unearthly chill across the land in the referendum's immediate aftermath and then as a frenzied, Brueghelian street party in a seaside town, a fittingly grotesque backdrop to the novel's unsettling progress. * The Irish Times *
Carries the reader along with a sense of foreboding, with a shocking twist at the end. * L.F. Robertson, author of Two Lost Boys *
A breathless page-turner with gathering tension throughout. * Rebecca Alexander, author of A Baby's Bones *
Full of palpable unease and tension creeping down every page. I inhaled this book! I could not put it down! * Prima *
[A] dark, well-told, twisting psychological tale * Saga *

Author Bio

A. S. Hatch grew up in Lancashire in the 90s and has lived in Taipei and Melbourne. Now he lives in London and writes fiction in the early hours of the morning before going to work in political communications.