A novel within a novel…a masterpiece of brilliance that will dazzle you. Tony and Susan is an eerie, riveting novel of reading and writing, fear and regret, blood and revenge... It is simultaneously a riveting portrayal of the experience of reading and a page-turning thriller, written in startlingly arresting prose. It is also a novel about fear and regret, revenge and aging, marriage and creativity. It is simply unique.
Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband Edward Sheffield. One day, comfortable in her home, and her second marriage, she receives, entirely out of the blue, a parcel containing the manuscript of her ex-husband's first novel. He writes asking her to read the book; she was always his best critic, he says. As Susan reads, she is drawn into the fictional life of his character Tony Hastings, a maths professor driving his family to their summer house in Maine. And as we read with her, so are we. As the Hastings' ordinary, civilized lives are disastrously, violently sent off course, Susan is plunged back into the past, forced to confront the darkness that inhabits her, and driven to name the fear that gnaws at her future and will change her life.
'Absorbing, terrifying, beautiful and appalling. I loved it... Unforgettable.' Ruth Rendell
'Impressive, enigmatic, multi-layered... I want to read it all over again' Sarah Waters
'Marvellously written - the last thing you would expect in a story of blood and revenge. Beautiful.' Saul Bellow
'A masterful study of marriage, regret and the reader's role.' Adrian Turpin, Financial Times
'My favourite novel of 2010 would have been my favourite novel of 1993 - if only I had known about it.' The Times
Author
About Austin Wright
Austin M. Wright was born in New York in 1922. He was a novelist and academic. He lived with his wife and daughters in Cincinnati, and died in 2003 at the age of eighty.
