Featured on The TV Book Club on More4 on 21 February 2010.
A psychological eco-thriller is probably the best way to describe this book. The two main characters, psychologist Gabrielle Fox and the psychiatric patient she is treating, Bethany Krall, draw the reader in from the start with tantalizing insights in to these two damaged people. As Bethany seems to be able to predict forthcoming natural disasters Gabrielle must figure out if this is a gift or just clever manipulation by a psychopath.
In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox's main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, one of the most dangerous teenagers in the country, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. Raised on a diet of evangelistic hellfire, Bethany is violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters - a claim which Gabrielle interprets as a symptom of doomsday delusion.
But when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, and a brilliant, gentle physicist enters the equation, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. Is the self-proclaimed Nostradamus of the psych ward the ultimate manipulator, or could she be the harbinger of imminent global cataclysm on a scale never seen before? And what can love mean in 'interesting times'? A haunting story of human passion and burning faith set against an adventure of tectonic proportions, "The Rapture" is an electrifying psychological thriller that explores the dark extremes of mankind's self-destruction in a world on the brink.
Liz Jensen is the author of Egg Dancing (longlisted for the Orange Prize), Ark Baby (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize), The Paper Eater, War Crimesfor the Home (longlisted for the Orange Prize), The Ninth Life of Louis Drax and My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time. She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.
