LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
I’ve rarely read a book that gave me so much writer’s envy as Mrs March. From the first page, I kept thinking – I wish I’d written this. There’s not too much I can say about the plot without spoiling some of the novel’s most surprising pleasures, but I’ll try.
Mrs March, preparing for a party to celebrate her husband’s latest novel, discovers that the main character in the novel, an aging prostitute who nobody wants to sleep with, is based on her. This sets off a chain of speculation and increasingly macabre events that leave the reader wound tight as a spring – and Mrs March begins to suspect that her husband, George, may in fact be a murderer. Or is Mrs March going mad? We are distanced from our highly unreliable narrator until the very last page by never knowing her first name. Yet Virginia Feito simultaneously hews us so closely into her protagonists’ perspective that it becomes an act of horror in itself. The prose is spare, hallucinatory, peppered with razor sharp insight. It’s one of the best evocations I have ever read of anxiety, the inner gallop of panic induced by the prospect of making a decision. Mrs March’s gradual transformation over the course of the book is agonising to witness. And it is deeply, deliciously gothic.
Selected by Catriona Ward, Our Winter 2022 Guest Editor. Click here to read the full Guest Editor Piece.
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Mrs March Synopsis
Shirley Jackson meets Ottessa Moshfegh meets My Sister the Serial Killer in a brilliantly unsettling and darkly funny debut novel full of suspense and paranoia
George March’s latest novel is a smash hit. None could be prouder than Mrs. March, his dutiful wife, who revels in his accolades and relishes the lifestyle and status his success brings.
A creature of routine and decorum, Mrs. March lives an exquisitely controlled existence on the Upper East Side. Every morning begins the same way, with a visit to her favourite patisserie to buy a loaf of
olive bread, but her latest trip proves to be her last when she suffers an indignity from which she may never recover: an assumption by the shopkeeper that the protagonist in George March’s new book –
a pathetic sex worker, more a figure of derision than desire – is based on Mrs. March.
One casual remark robs Mrs. March not only of her beloved olive bread but of the belief that she knew everything about her husband – and herself – sending her on an increasingly paranoid journey, one
that starts within the pages of a book but may very well uncover both a killer and the long-buried secrets of Mrs. March’s past.
A razor-sharp exploration of the fragility of identity and the smothering weight of expectations, Mrs. March heralds the arrival of a wicked and wonderful new voice.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780008421755 |
| Publication date: |
26th May 2022 |
| Author: |
Virginia Feito |
| Publisher: |
Fourth Estate Ltd an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
288 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Family Drama
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Press Reviews
Virginia Feito Press Reviews
'I read Mrs March in one sitting and was so captured by it ... As a character, [Mrs March] is fascinating, complex, and deeply human' Elisabeth Moss
'Feito nods deftly to her forebears - there are shades of Hitchcock and Highsmith here ... while the opening chapter puts one in mind of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway ... Nastily good fun' Claire Allfree, Metro
'Virginia Feito's noirish debut novel left me rapt, gleefully ambivalent about her eponymous protagonist: did I like her? Did I find her funny? Did I want to hug her? Was I bit a scared of her? Did I relate to her? To all of the above: yes ... an elegant, claustrophobic psychological thriller that feels incredibly original' Evening Standard
'What a rancid little book, I absolutely loved it' Alice Slater
'The atmosphere of queasy foreboding is compelling, as is the portrayal of a flawed, troubled and complex individual trying to keep it together while coming apart at the seams' Economist
'A brilliantly tense psychological study from a writer who keeps pace with the grandees she invokes - Du Maurier, for one ... Feito has done that most horrible, wonderful and truly novelistic of things: she has seen right through Mrs March and into the shameful, petty, maggoty secrets that everybody carries' Guardian
'A delicious, disorienting study of suspicion, societal pressure and shifting identities, brilliantly rendered. I swallowed this tale down as greedily as if it were Mrs. March's beloved olive bread' Rachel Edwards, author of Darling
'Gloriously grotesque: tormented by the desire for glossy magazine perfection; cruelly judgemental; frantic to believe the world revolves around her. And yet Feito makes her guilt-inducingly relatable...The gothic awfulness of her predicament reminds you of Ottessa Moshfegh's grand guignol creations and lurid descriptive talents; Shirley Jackson's claustrophobic horror' The Times
