Her: A Novel

by Harriet Lane

Overview

You don't remember her — but she remembers you.

Two different women; two different worlds. On the face of it, Emma and Nina have very little in common. Isolated and exhausted by early motherhood, Emma finds her confidence is fading fast. Nina is sophisticated and assured, a successful artist who seems to have it all under control. And yet, when the two women meet, they are irresistibly drawn to each other. As the friendship develops, as Emma gratefully invites Nina into her life, it emerges that someone is playing games-and the stakes could not be higher.

What, exactly, does Nina see in Emma? What does she want? And how far will she go in pursuit of it?

A gripping novel about friendship and identity, about the wild hopes and worst fears of parenthood, about the small and easily forgotten moments that come to define a life, Her is unputdownable-compelling and hauntingly discomfiting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316369886
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/06/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	748,546
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Harriet Lane has worked as an editor and writer at Tatler and the Observer. She has also written for the Guardian, the Telegraph and Vogue. She is the author of two novels, Her and Alys, Always. She lives in north London with her husband and two children.

What People are Saying About This

Christina Schwarz

Compelling and chilling. Like all good thrillers, HER creeps up on you. You can't stop lapping up the rich domestic details, the astute observations about modern motherhood and female friendship, but you're skittish, aware of the growing shadow. What happened in the past? Which one is the psychopath? The end will make you yelp. --Christina Schwarz, author of Drowning Ruth

Tom McNeal

A spellbinding book. Think of Virginia Woolf under the influence of Claude Chabrol. Just beneath the smooth, beautiful sentences lies a world alive with terror. --Tom McNeal, author of To Be Sung Underwater

Koren Zailckas

This book knocked the breath out of me in the very best sense. Her is mesmerizing, nail-biting, deeply atmospheric and, ultimately, haunting. Harriet Lane has crafted an intoxicating interplay between friendship and betrayal, mothering and memory, vulnerability and opportunity. Watching the story unfold is like watching the perfect storm gather at sea and roll in toward the coast. The creeping sense of inevitability, combined with warning signals that foretell something dangerously wrong, adds up to a suspense novel that's all kinds of right. --Koren Zailckas, author of Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

Vendela Vida

Suspenseful, boundary-pushing, and very difficult to put down. --Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers

Lori Roy

In her captivating new novel, HER, Harriet Lane crafts a tale of suspense that seeps slowly and inevitably between the cracks of two otherwise ordinary lives. Writing with a quiet confidence and an eye for the most perfect details, Ms. Lane lures her readers into the lives of Nina and Emma, two women at opposite ends of raising a family. Ms. Lane finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, and this gift will keep readers enthralled until the novel's thrilling end. --Lori Roy, author of Bent Road and Until She Comes Home

Ann Leary

Never have I seen the angst and vulnerability of early motherhood so vividly portrayed. Harriet Lane explores the tyranny of domesticity and the almost primitive bonds that link women to their children and also to other mothers. HER is at once funny and terrifying. I read it in one sitting and when I was finally able to put it down, my heart was pounding. --Ann Leary, author of The Good House

Chris Pavone

A gripping, chilling, powerful novel of unintended consequences and undeserved retributions, youthful innocence and middle-aged regret, parental guilt and filial obligation, all played out on the dangerous edge of rationality. --Chris Pavone, author of The Expats

Editorial Reviews

"A gripping, chilling, powerful novel of unintended consequences and undeserved retributions, youthful innocence and middle-aged regret, parental guilt and filial obligation, all played out on the dangerous edge of rationality."—Chris Pavone, author of The Expats

"Compelling and chilling. Like all good thrillers, HER creeps up on you. You can't stop lapping up the rich domestic details, the astute observations about modern motherhood and female friendship, but you're skittish, aware of the growing shadow. What happened in the past? Which one is the psychopath? The end will make you yelp."—Christina Schwarz, author of Drowning Ruth

"Never have I seen the angst and vulnerability of early motherhood so vividly portrayed. Harriet Lane explores the "tyranny of domesticity" and the almost primitive bonds that link women to their children and also to other mothers. HER is at once funny and terrifying. I read it in one sitting and when I was finally able to put it down, my heart was pounding."—Ann Leary, author of The Good House

"This book knocked the breath out of me in the very best sense. HER is mesmerizing, nail-biting, deeply atmospheric and, ultimately, haunting. Harriet Lane has crafted an intoxicating interplay between friendship and betrayal, mothering and memory, vulnerability and opportunity. Watching the story unfold is like watching the perfect storm gather at sea and roll in toward the coast. The creeping sense of inevitability, combined with warning signals that foretell something dangerously wrong, adds up to a suspense novel that's all kinds of right."—Koren Zailckas, author of Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

"In her captivating new novel, HER, Harriet Lane crafts a tale of suspense that seeps slowly and inevitably between the cracks of two otherwise ordinary lives. Writing with a quiet confidence and an eye for the most perfect details, Ms. Lane lures her readers into the lives of Nina and Emma, two women at opposite ends of raising a family. Ms. Lane finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, and this gift will keep readers enthralled until the novel's thrilling end."—Lori Roy, author of Bent Road and Until She Comes Home

"A spellbinding book. Think of Virginia Woolf under the influence of Claude Chabrol. Just beneath the smooth, beautiful sentences lies a world alive with terror."—Tom McNeal, author of To Be Sung Underwater

"Lane is a brilliant observer of the intricacies of the everyday.... As seductive as it is chilling, HER is quality literary fiction meets psychological thriller, the devil of which is in the detail."—Lucy Scholes, Guardian (UK)

"Early contender for book of the year. Another triumph from Harriet Lane."—Erin Kelly

"With chilling precision, Lane narrates the re-entwining of these two women's lives through domestic details. Afternoon teas, disastrous shopping trips, cluttered homes and even well-populated playgrounds begin to seep with danger. And the net inexorably tightens. A domestic thriller of the first order."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A gracefully written psychological thriller about friendship wielded as a weapon.... Like Nina herself, the novel is subtle, deliberate, chillingly effective, and hauntingly sad."—Publishers Weekly

"Lane gradually pulls the threads of her story tighter and tighter...the ambiguity of her characterization is excellent, and your loyalties shift. Acutely observed, it's also a meditation on parental legacy, motherhood, and not always believing that the grass is greener on the other side."—Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist, for Self.com

"Wickedly sharp.... A brilliant novel."—Donna Marchetti, Cleveland Plain Dealer

From the Publisher

10/06/2014
Lane follows her debut, Alys, Always, with a gracefully written psychological thriller about friendship wielded as a weapon. Affluent artist Nina Bremner glimpses a lovely but disheveled pregnant woman shopping with a toddler one day and experiences a shock of recognition. She once knew Emma Nash—and her hatred for the other woman simmers, though it’s not clear why. When Nina lifts Emma’s wallet and pretends to have found it on the street, Emma does not recognize her. Alternating chapters in the women’s viewpoints reveal the friendship Nina proffers like a fairy tale’s gleaming, poisoned apple. Nina’s acts of sabotage—rifling through Emma’s possessions, surreptitiously beckoning her son away when he strays from Emma’s side in the park, taking and discarding the toy bunny he clings to—go undetected until Nina offers Emma’s family a vacation stay at Nina’s father’s opulent home. There she waits patiently to tear Emma’s world apart. Woven through the details of the women’s very different lives are suspenseful questions: how Emma has injured Nina, whether she will discover her frenemy’s duplicity in time, and whether evil is created or inborn. Cannily, Lane leaves some of the answers ambiguous; like Nina herself, the novel is subtle, deliberate, chillingly effective, and hauntingly sad. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

A taught revenge drama….the endgame, when it comes, is shattering.

The Independent (UK)

Lane's writing is always careful and elegant, loaded with significance and often beautiful.

The Telegraph (UK)

[Harriet Lane's] cornered the market when it comes to unassuming but distinctly dangerous, creepy female protagonists….As seductive as it is chilling, HER is quality literary fiction meets psychological thriller.
—The Guardian (UK)

The Guardian (UK)

Narrator Julie Maisey does an excellent job conveying Emma and Nina, two seemingly opposite women who are linked by a meeting decades earlier that only Nina recalls. Maisey compellingly portrays how differently the two women see the same events in their now intersecting lives. The novel’s point of view seamlessly switches between that of the polished and often flippant Nina and that of anxious new mother Emma—to reveal hidden agendas and secret worries. Maisey helps listeners understand that every action and gesture of each woman has multiple meanings in a game that only one of them is playing. A.L.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2015 - AudioFile

Narrator Julie Maisey does an excellent job conveying Emma and Nina, two seemingly opposite women who are linked by a meeting decades earlier that only Nina recalls. Maisey compellingly portrays how differently the two women see the same events in their now intersecting lives. The novel’s point of view seamlessly switches between that of the polished and often flippant Nina and that of anxious new mother Emma—to reveal hidden agendas and secret worries. Maisey helps listeners understand that every action and gesture of each woman has multiple meanings in a game that only one of them is playing. A.L.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2015 - AudioFile

★ 2014-09-16
The minutiae of everyday life turn sinister for two women in this taut, fraught tale. In her sophomore novel, Lane (Alys, Always, 2012) alternates between the perspectives of Nina and Emma, two 40-something women who've taken different routes through motherhood. Both Nina and her second husband have teenage daughters from their first marriages, but except for a bit of adolescent surliness, the throes of child-rearing are well behind them. Nina can afford to dress with chic simplicity, to keep an elegant home and to avoid her father's invitations to summer in the south of France. Ever since his wandering eye (and probable philandering) broke up his marriage to Nina's mother, Nina has resented Paul. His attentions never settle on her, so why bother with the charade of a happy luncheon, much less a family vacation? Emma, on the other hand, is saddled with a demanding toddler and expecting another baby. She knows she ought to be a doting mother, but desperate words underscore her thoughts: "All this buttoning and unbuttoning." She longs for respite from the endless laundry and meal production but knows they'll have to rely on Ben's paycheck until the kids are in school. After Nina finds and returns Emma's wallet, which she oddly lost at the greengrocer's shop, the women strike up an uneasy friendship. Emma sees in Nina the woman she wishes she could be: cultured and smartly dressed. What draws Nina to Emma is murkier. Nina, in fact, recognizes Emma, although Emma seems to have no memory of a past friendship. With chilling precision, Lane narrates the re-entwining of these two women's lives through domestic details. Afternoon teas, disastrous shopping trips, cluttered homes and even well-populated playgrounds begin to seep with danger. And the net inexorably tightens. A domestic thriller of the first order.

Kirkus Reviews