Samantha Harvey

Writer - Fiction and Non-fiction

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Associate: Seren Adams

Books

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels and one work of non-fiction. Her latest novel, Orbital, takes place on a space station and is an account of a single 24-hour day in low earth orbit.

Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize, and The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize.

She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in the UK.

Praise for THE SHAPELESS UNEASE (2020):

'The Shapeless Unease captures the essence of fractious emotions – anxiety, fear, grief, rage – in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.' Sarah Waters

'I know I should be writing but over lunch I started reading a proof copy of THE SHAPELESS UNEASE: A YEAR OF NOT SLEEPING by Samantha Harvey and oh gods it is so good I can hardly breathe <3... I mean the downside is that now I feel I should give up writing in the face of it... Completely floored by it.' Helen Macdonald, via Twitter

‘How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so full? Gritty with particulars, concrete and substantial even when it is most philosophical and far-reaching. I loved reading it before I fell asleep every night – it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.’ Tessa Hadley

‘Quite how Sam managed to shape such a vast terrain into such a small volume is beyond me. I found it to be truly mesmeric. There's an irony that it kept me up late into the late, but reading it feels like its own kind of lucid dream… its clarity of expression is startling. It's a fireworks display… Harvey is the most exceptionally gifted of authors, and here she demonstrates that she can literally do anything.’ Nathan Filer

‘[I am] still shuddering, almost, from the beautiful, beautiful writing and its broken, angry, vibrant demand - a dare almost - to accept life, and brave it, with all it brings.’ Cynan Jones

‘What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so WILD. One of the best books I’ve read about writing. One of the best books I’ve read about swimming. One of the best books I’ve read about mourning. And easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country.’ Max Porter

'This book felt enormous to me, mercurial, devastating, seeming to grapple with the nature of everything in a manner so compelling it is impossible not to be swept along. A book to return to again and again.' Daisy Johnson

‘It's funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country. There's also something unrefined, raw and spontaneous about the writing that I found hugely appealing.’ Andrew Miller

‘Poetic and inventive… Just as much as insomnia, though, The Shapeless Unease is a meditation on the nature of creativity (writing in particular); how it emerges even in the course of a fractured life… Her countless aphorisms (“fiction is the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words”) are a delight to read. And she has great comedic timing… The fragmentary style of the memoir chimes with the temporal nature of Harvey’s condition; it is an account of her slippery present life that’s suffused with the sense of a timeless fable… Her reflections on dipping into a lake have the quality of a lucid dream… The clinical psychologist Rubin Naiman once bemoaned that “sleep has been transformed from a deeply personal experience to a physiological process; from the mythical to the medical”. With The Shapeless Unease, Samantha Harvey has reversed that process in ways that are ineffably rewarding.’ Colin Grant, GuardianBook of the Day’

‘[A] raw and unsettling account of 12 months of inexplicable insomnia… And beautifully, if unsettlingly, Harvey captures the roiling exhaustion, the fuggy disbelief and irrational anger of this newly uncertain state when “the world becomes profoundly unsafe” and the boundaries between the inner and outer self start to blur… Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.’ Helen Davies, Sunday Times

‘Poetic, visceral… The Shapeless Unease contains many beautiful and poignant passages about the human will to keep on living. Even in her most ragged moments [Harvey] can’t help but exult in what Philip Larkin calls “the million-petalled flower of being here”. Awake at 3am, she realises: “That’s the trick of life — it seems so abundant, and even while we’re watching it die all around us it’s whispering in our ears sweet nothings of plenitude.” Harvey’s imagery casts a spell.’ Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times

‘[A] patchwork quilt of conversations, memories, encounters and musings, the fruits of a mind so electrically alert that no drug seems to numb or quiet it… The lurching around from subject to subject, and from memory to memory, makes it feel as if we, too, are in Harvey’s sleep-starved brain, wandering with her into existential dark woods and feeling the crackle of every synapse. It’s an extraordinary journey, but it’s also mesmerising. Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about – well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive… The big surprise is that this book about ‘shapeless unease’ is, in the end, a glittering, playful and, yes, joyful celebration of that glorious gift of glorious life.’ Daily Mail

‘Although Harvey writes with a hefty dose of self-deprecating humour, she quickly makes it clear that insomnia is no laughing matter… She writes brilliantly about the sort of thoughts that plague the insomniac at night… Harvey’s accounts of [GP] consultations, perhaps the best things in the book, are a masterly dramatization of the doctor-patient dynamic… [She] has certainly proved that insomnia, as much as any of the more obviously nasty diseases, might be as worth a subject of literature as love, battle or jealousy, and at its best, her book rises to that level.’ Telegraph 

‘[A] genre-defying sort-of-autobiography… Some of the most fascinating passages take us behind the scenes of Harvey’s creative process… [A] bravely exposing deep dive into the emotional murk of her restless mind.’ Anthony Cummins, i

‘Merciless… Writing should take us to places we wouldn’t otherwise go, and Harvey invites us to open our eyes in the darkness and feel the tiger in the room.’ Frances Wilson, Telegraph *****

‘There can be few people for whom Samantha Harvey’s dazzling, dizzying trip through the nightmare world of the sleepless will be completely foreign… Packed into this wondrous little book – a sort of stream of consciousness of night-time imaginings – is a treasure trove of material… [Harvey is] brilliant on words and the nature of writing. So, obligingly, Harvey, a well-regarded novelist, gives us a gripping little book within a book: fragments of a crime story about a likeable bloke who robs ATMS… It’s pretty funny as well, this book. The Shapeless Unease is also one of the best books you will find about swimming. And its wonders.’ Roger Alton, Daily Mail

‘[A] disturbing, vivid account [of insomnia]. The prose is urgent and wild, but also dazzling in its precision. This is what it must be like to try to keep hold of a brilliant mind that is threatening to unspool. The Shapeless Unease is cubistic, the fragments of text… fit together perfectly to reveal a subject that is there all right, exposed from every angle, but also just beyond reach. It’s a book about sleep and wakefulness, but also about life and death, and the liminal spaces between them. It’s about motherhood and childlessness, love and loss, writing, rage, Brexit. It’s a dark seductive book about fear and madness and their allure… Harvey’s sharply observed interactions with her doctor offer a powerful critique of how women’s suffering is too often dismissed or seen as self-inflicted… Reading The Shapeless Unease can feel not unlike dipping into strange, uncharted waters: it is by turns bracing and soothing, with a dark undertow and glimmers of light at the surface, and one emerges from it with an altered perspective, a sense of time having slowed down.’ Sophie McBain, New Statesman

‘A beautiful meditation on insomnia.’ Stylist

‘This is an extremely curious book, and I mean that as a sincere compliment. The spine of it is writing around Samantha Harvey’s experience of insomnia; but it becomes far more than a moan about sleeplessness. Her efforts to understand what is happening (or more precisely not happening) spiral out in manifold ways… I found it intricately intriguing… It reads like a form of prose poetry, but in its endless circling perfectly captures the idea of insomnia… The this-and-that-ness of this book is what makes it a particular joy. It moves between topics with ease, and yet at its heart it is an emotional book, in which loss of sleep and loss of family are the poles.’ Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

Praise for THE WESTERN WIND (2018): 

‘Harvey ingeniously builds a marvellously convincing medieval world out of modern language.’ Justine Jordan, Guardian ‘Books of the Year 2018’

In the classroom, I sometimes find myself talking to my students about the differences between “reading for pleasure” and “reading like a writer.” For decades, I tell them, I’ve been unable to read any piece of fiction truly for pleasure. But lately I find myself struggling not just with my inability to not read like a writer, but now also to not read like the liberal American writer that I am. I say all this because it is through a very particular lens – liberal, American, not to mention atheistic – that I read and utterly enjoyed Samantha Harvey’s latest novel, “The Western Wind.” […] I have plenty to say about her beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient fourth book […] this medieval whodunit miraculously captures the otherworldly, fish-out-of-water, discombobulating experience of being a liberal American today. […] Harvey’s is a story of suspense, yes. It is a story of a community crowded with shadows and secrets. But to read this novel is to experience a kind of catharsis. In John Reve, a 15th-century priest at war with his instincts and inclinations and at times even with his own flock, we find a kind of Everyman, and Harvey delivers a singular character at once completely unfamiliar and wholly universal.New York Times Book Review

‘This time last year […] I pondered the wisdom of declaring my book of the year in March but was happily vindicated when George Saunders went on to win the Man Booker Prize 2017. So, thus emboldened, I’m going to call it again (my book of the year); The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey. It is quite unlike anything else I have read. […] The truly extraordinary thing about this novel is the way Harvey re-creates the mindset and beliefs of the medieval world, and makes the concerns of 500 years ago vivid and immediate.’ Alice O’Keefe, Bookseller Book of the Month March 2018

‘Leaving aside its structural daring and prose at once precise and suggestive, it is an exhilarating mystery that pitches familiar tropes – a bereaved and fearful community, a melancholy investigator and his unsympathetic superior, a frantic search for deeds and wills – into the heart of late 15th-century rural England. The collision of the early modern and the present-day is startling and energising, and never does it seem stagey. […] It is a novel to read and then to read again, with a second go revealing an even more expert and carefully controlled patterning and intent and allowing Harvey’s striking topographical and animal metaphors to percolate further. Literary reputations are almost entirely unguessable, and sometimes unfair; but, early in the year though it is, this must surely be in the running for one of its best novels.’ Alex Clark, Spectator

‘Harvey specialises in the unravelling both of mental states and narratives, so it’s appropriate perhaps that her fourth, The Western Wind, is a medieval detective story. […] Harvey delivers all this with the intelligence and sympathy you would expect from the author of The Wilderness. Her typical concerns present themselves: captivation by a moment of being; the passing nature of happiness; and what critic Gaby Wood described in 2015 as the “drama of defeat”. Her door, like Reve’s, is open to everything human, even the villagers’ more medieval excesses of behaviour and belief, including European animal mask rituals reminiscent of an Axel Hoedt photograph. Her prose is as rich as ever, her structures clever and efficient. The narrative is an indirect, cumulative revelation of something we half-guessed from the beginning, but which remains shadowy enough that we daren’t put the book down in case we’re proved right. […] The Western Wind is as densely packed as all of Harvey’s work: it’s a historical novel full of the liveliness and gristle of the period it depicts; an absorbing mystery with an unpredictable flurry of twists in its last few pages; a scarily nuanced examination of a long-term moral collapse; a beautifully conceived and entangled metaphor for Britain’s shifting relationships with Europe. But most of all it’s a deeply human novel of the grace to be found in people.’ M. John Harrison, Guardian

‘[A] rich and sumptuous delight. At the micro-level of the individual sentences, the language manages to be both luminously lyrical and endlessly sharp. […] On the wider historical level, the compelling portrait of that medieval world is given added poignancy by the distant drumbeat of the Reformation – and with it, a reminder that it’s a world far more precarious than anybody in it could possibly have imagined. […] And, in the end, for all its many other qualities – including the more traditional satisfactions of pace and plotting – it’s perhaps as a character study that The Western Wind works most triumphantly, with Reve’s spectacularly mixed motives impeccably delineated. […] [E]ven the most glowing reviews of [Harvey’s] work have tended to be accompanied by a rueful acknowledgement of how underrated she is. The Western Wind will surely mean that she’s not underrated any more.’ Daily Telegraph  

‘[W]hile Samantha Harvey’s fourth novel is on the surface a medieval whodunit, it is also a fine character study, and a brilliantly convincing evocation of both time and place. Father Reve is a wonderful creation: patient, wry, humane, riven by doubt and full of empathy for the villagers who come to his little church to confess their trivial sins. His voice is totally convincing, never slipping into caricature or cliché, and Harvey creates for him an inner life so rich and detailed that at times the experience her book engenders is less like reading a novel and more akin to time travel – something I’ve only previously encountered in the work of Hilary Mantel. And like Mantel, Harvey’s historical research is exemplary, but lightly worn: she evokes the drab, circumscribed but shifting late medieval world by telling details often related to the senses, rather than relying on historical exposition, hammy language or clumsy attempts to make strange. There is great pleasure to be had in those vertiginous moments when authentic, banal reality – what the medieval friar-philosopher Duns Scotus would have called the haecceitas, or “thisness” of the past – seems briefly to make itself known to the imagination, and The Western Wind is almost uniquely satisfying in this regard.’ Financial Times

‘While ostensibly a change of tack, The Western Wind, about a priest who purports to investigate the drowning of a wealthy landowner, sticks to [Harvey’s] abiding theme of how easily memory – a matter of belief – can lapse into self-deception. […] Harvey has in the past been a dab hand with an unreliable narrator and the sly structure of Reve’s account, which starts four days after Newman’s death before moving backwards, gives his actions layers of significance that it takes time to excavate. […] The story is rich and tangled but never slow. Harvey isn’t afraid to end a chapter with a jolt of drama (“it was then that I heard something crash”) and her language is relaxed, easy on ye olde syntax and with only a dash of antique vocabulary […] it’s hard not to be riveted by [Harvey’s] portrait of a fearful community in the grip of secrecy, or to admire the complexly drawn protagonist who, inwardly grappling with his faith, isn’t so holy that he’s above a bit of realpolitik.’ Observer

‘[The Western Wind] is at once a literary detective story, an awkward confession, a study of a crisis in authority and faith, and a moving portrait of a tight-knit community’s dim awareness of encroaching threat. […] There is a feeling that it could establish Harvey as a commercial, as well as literary, contender. […] In the novel, the process of pre-Lent confession – mandatory, because of the investigation into the drowning of one of their fellows – becomes a clever device for introducing us to the villagers, but also to multiple unreliable confessions. The novel skilfully evokes their world – comparisons with Jim Crace’s Harvest or Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels stand.’ Sunday Times   

‘Another luminous classic […] so ingenious in its plotting and characterisation that it begs to be read twice – the second reading a confirmation of what is slowly, tantalisingly revealed in the first. This mysterious, ominous novel begins at the end of the story with the discovery of the body. It beautifully works its way back to the start, sparking and flickering with the jealousies, affairs, conflicts and desires of the villagers, who are brilliantly described as they go about their days. At the heart of this tinderbox is naïve, clever, often-foolish Reve, who is as fallible as his parishioners but attempting to make the best of a situation that is becoming increasingly fraught and fractious. Samantha Harvey’s prose is luminous, a wonderfully lyrical look at the way religious belief and pragmatism battles it out in the heart of a good man.’ Daily Express *****

‘[T]he yearning to speak one’s sins and be forgiven lies at the heart of Samantha Harvey’s brooding historical mystery […] Like all good whodunits, The Western Wind teases us with possibilities. […] Harvey’s prose is rich in both local and historical detail; the novel powerfully conveys the murky atmosphere of Oakham, “churned and soaked and listless in its mood and colour”. The first-person narration similarly immerses us in Reve’s perplexities: his moral path is as muddy as the tracks down to the river. […] But The Western Wind is not really meant to be a puzzle; instead, its mystery provides the occasion for a compelling account of a place and time fraught with tensions, and of a complex man who has reached for salvation but found only “a moment of fractured hope”.’ Times Literary Supplement

The Western Wind is remarkable and often beautiful, well enough written to be called exhilarating […] Once you understand why the narrative has been structured [in reverse], you will recognise the author’s cleverness […] Her novel is darkly atmospheric, descriptions of weather, scenery, the village and the harsh lives of the parishioners darkly convincing. Harvey succeeds in making the imaginative leap from our own secular age to one in which there is widespread certainty that this life is no more than a prelude to eternity, and a testing-ground for men and women. […] The Western Wind is a novel by a very talented author, one which is often beautifully and evocatively written, clever in structure, and decidedly unusual. […] [A] novel that will surely feature on prize shortlists.’ The Scotsman 

The Western Wind starts off with a drowned man in a river. Set in the 1400s but never feeling dusty or distant, this astonishing book is at once a rollicking mystery and a profound meditation on faith and existence.’ Guardian ‘The best fiction for 2018’

Trumping all the [other forthcoming books] might be Samantha Harvey, whose relative anonymity should end if her next novel, The Western Wind, does as well as it deserves come March. Set in 15th-century England, it is a murder mystery, an acute dissection of class and money, and fabulously written.’ James Kidd, South China Morning Post ‘The must-read books to come in 2018’

The Western Wind is an extraordinary, wise, wild and beautiful book - a thrilling mystery story and a lyrical enquiry into ideas of certainty and belief. Surprising, richly imagined, gloriously strange - the best kind of fiction.’ Joanna Kavenna, author of A Field Guide to Reality

‘Harvey is up there with the best writers working today. Here she makes the medieval world feel as relevant and pressing as tomorrow morning because – as always – she captures the immutable stuff of the human condition.’ Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall     

‘An imposing medieval mystery about a fearful religious community in the grips of secrecy. In her fourth novel, Harvey has meticulously fashioned a historical mystery set in Oakham, a small, damp village in southwestern England, isolated by a river and buffeted by chilly winds. […] But this is no British cozy. Harvey has subtly crafted a complex narrative by adding another twist—the story goes backward. […] Harvey provides a wide array of intriguing, mostly pitiful suspects, each bearing some guilt, who live, Reve says, "in wariness at the whims and punishments of God." The story is told in pensive, faux medieval prose, with chapter titles that suggestively repeat back and forth as the overall narrative inexorably, circuitously unwinds from present to past. A dazzling, challenging read but one worth taking on. Kirkus Reviews

‘Harvey evokes the darkness of both winter and spirit with stark yet lovely imagery: “I didn’t know how the trees kept their enthusiasm for growing.” Reve’s meditations on purgatory, illness as punishment, priestly intervention, God in nature, and the nature of sin are mirrored in the story as the characters grapple with the grief of loss and the frustration of ambiguity. Like Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996) and Morris West's The Last Confession (2001), this compulsively readable portrait of doubt and faith reveals, in small lives, humanity’s biggest questions.’ Jen Baker, Booklist (starred review)

‘Harvey weaves a dazzling tapestry around loss and confession in late-15th-century England in this breathtaking novel. […] The lush period details and acute psychological insight will thrill fans of literary mysteries and historical fiction. This is an utterly engrossing novel.’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

‘[A] carefully pace mystery […] The Western Wind is filled with the rich details of rural medieval life, but the unique structure of the story gives the novel a fresh and modern sensibility. In addition, Oakham’s remoteness and parochial village church is contrasted with the spiritual changes coming to both England and the rest of Europe, bringing to mind contemporary issues such as Brexit and the refugee crisis. Harvey […] has written a densely packed historical novel that never seems dusty or precious, relishing in the psychological intricacies of power and faith but still crackling with suspense and intrigue.’ BookPage

‘Harvey is an intelligent and audacious writer, able and willing to take creative risks and perform stylistic feats. […] This is a beautifully written and expertly structured medieval mystery packed with intrigue, drama and shock revelations. "The Western Wind" is no humdrum whodunit. […] Harvey plays with unreliable narration, probes memory and airs elusive or inconvenient truths. […] We navigate the corners of Harvey's characters, all the while marveling at the intricacy of her puzzle and the seductiveness of her prose.’ Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

‘[A]n unusual and intelligent historical mystery’ Scotsman

‘[A] bleak and transporting historical novel […] Harvey’s decision to tell the story in reverse chronological order, working backwards toward Newman’s death […] changes the novel from a standard procedural to something more philosophical. Reve’s narrative, with its gradual drip-feed of disclosures, is itself a confession, as cagily distorted and withholding as those of his parishioners. […] Harvey has summoned this remote world with writing of the highest quality, conjuring its pungencies and peculiarities. […] The dialogue throughout is excellent, blessedly free of the “thous”s and “thee”s that often oppress novels set in the Middle Ages, yet still strange and uncanny, just slightly displaced from conversation as we experience it. […] In this superb novel, time, like guilt, is a murky medium, at once advancing and circling back, and pulling humankind helplessly between its battling currents.’ Wall Street Journal

‘This was the most underrated novel of the year. […] Hardly a page goes by without a wondrous observation about the movement of light (“In the empty, white light their little fields looked like boats becalmed at sea”) or the movement of grace (“you don’t go upwards through air to find the Lord, trilling like a bluebird; you go down, through the pit of yourself”). Harvey regularly reminds me of Marilynne Robinson – the highest compliment I can pay any novelist.’ Commonweal, ‘Best books of 2018’

‘It’s true that the plot [of The Western Wind] appears to wind itself around an unexplained death. But it is, like great films, built of much smaller moments, colors, smells and sounds. It is a novel with an atmosphere that demands to be experienced. […] To tell a story backward is another experiment for [Harvey]. She is, in a word, a stylist. But style without heart leaves a reader cold. Like her prior books, this experiment is not a circus trick, or a flaunting of skill. It is told backward for a reason motivated by the substance of the story itself. […] Harvey’s story plays games with time, because it plays with intentions and forgiveness. For those who read closely, Harvey has a small miracle up her sleeve.’ Washington Times

Praise for DEAR THIEF (2014): 

Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction; Longlisted for the 2015 Jerwood Prize

Dear Thief is a beautiful […] novel with no interest in conformity. Harvey’s book is propelled not by the usual structures of novel writing but by the quality of its author’s mind, by the luminousness of her prose, and by an ardent innocence of speculation that is rare in contemporary fiction. […] It is a strange and exhilarating journey, unlike anything I have recently encountered. […] One of the regular rewards of [the novel’s] prose is its careful attention to the world […] Harvey’s rarity can be found in her ability to move from the ordinary to the speculative, her dance to and from the metaphysical. There is steady pleasure and consolation in this for the reader […] Even as it tells its tale of determinism and fatality, this remarkable novel asserts its own curious freedoms.’ James Wood, New Yorker

Dear Thief is a novel of profound beauty. I’ll leave it at that.’ Michael Cunningham

‘A glorious, sensuous, grown-up novel, intelligent and passionate.’ Tessa Hadley

‘Samantha Harvey is a writer whose resolutely questing novels are, to use a phrase from her new novel, “like fresh air in a sick room”. […] Indubitably intelligent, Harvey’s prose is also quite simply ravishing; whatever the complex ideas surging beneath, the narrative order does not falter. She is interested in what at first glance seem unfashionable topics for contemporary fiction: theology, philosophy – both Western and Eastern – and that transfiguring divinity in human beings which can loosely be interpreted as a state of grace. Abstract ideas take on, in Harvey’s hands, the power of necessity, most potently in [Dear Thief] […] Harvey’s novel is compassionate, matter-of-fact and mysterious about death and its ultimate transforming […] in her exploration of relationships and the arc of a marriage which, by the end of the story, might be revived or relinquished for good, Harvey offers an incandescent vision of hope and acceptance.’ Catherine Taylor, Telegraph *****

‘Samantha Harvey continues to confound expectations. […] Dear Thief, [her] atmospheric third novel, denotes a major shift in gear. […] The novel is presented as a long letter, a literary decide that is difficult to pull off, but Harvey’s innovations electrify every word. […] In the voice of a middle-aged woman looking back over her marriage, Harvey had struck gold. It is an educated and meditative voice, reminiscent of those deployed by great stylists such as WG Sebald, Claire Messud, John Banville and Joseph O’Neill. […] In most books, events happen solely on the page. In the best books, events happen in the reader, too. Perhaps because it is so intimate, so honest, so raw, Dear Thief provokes you to think about life, and Life, and your own life, the people in it as well as the ghosts.’ Claire Kilroy, Guardian

Dear Thief is nothing less than a sermon to the lost, a lamentation echoing through the halls from which we have ejected God, an unblinking examination of art and love and death as different emanations of the same truth, the existence of which we can only trace the outlines with hope. […] It is the concern that behind the gauze of this life is simply nothingness that powers the unrelenting tension of Harvey’s stunning novel. […] Dear Thief is worthy of the abused critical adjectives philosophical, atmospheric, and masterful.’ The Daily Beast

‘Intimate, direct yet oddly mysterious […] one of the most beguiling novels of the year. […] Because the novel is written in the second person – “In answer to a question you asked a long time ago,” it begins – it gets you in its grip. The reader is instantly implicated in the story: though clearly you are not Butterfly, you are nevertheless somehow thrown into the shape of a character, and into an acquaintance with the narrator that suggests, as if by dim remembrance, that you each other once, and well. Harvey’s language is poetry, in a way that’s brave rather than sentimental, and her intricate observations demand to be dwelled upon. […] My advice would be not to wait until the next lifetime to discover this generation’s Virginia Woolf. The time to read Dear Thief is now.’ Gaby Wood, Telegraph

‘Harvey manages to trick the reader into believing that the writer simply wants to recount certain events of her life. But then it transpires the reason behind the letter lies deeper. Inventing characters and stories, says the narrator, is more rewarding: "How do you tell the difference between a person made of flesh and one made of words?" At the end of the book, we are not told whether the protagonist is going to reunite with her husband, or find Butterfly – the novel is too subtle for happy endings. What we do know is that by writing this letter she has got closer to finding her own self.’ Independent

Singular and haunting […] the sensuous, atmospheric tale Harvey has chosen to tell is (refreshingly) not the obvious there-are-three-people-in-this-marriage yarn. Indeed, Nicholas is something of a peripheral figure. Instead, it’s Nina and her subsequent fate that Harvey’s narrator broods over, with an intensity that could be described as love.’ Daily Mail

Praise for ALL IS SONG (2012):

‘Samantha Harvey's second novel is a languorous philosophical dialogue. It is slow but sensitively elegant. The brothers' discussions are dense and conceptually precise, repeatedly circling back to the same point. Likewise, Harvey's own prose articulates and re-articulates images and motifs, until they attain perfect, limpid expression: "We sculpt ourselves over time with our most persistent moods, as though our faces are dunes and our temperaments the winds that blow them into shape."’ Independent 

‘This is a novel of ideas that also creates believable characters and explores complex relationships. Harvey's prose is graceful and unhurried, full of sharp observation and moments of subtly understated pathos. It's good to read the work of a writer who refuses to compromise or fit neatly into any given category, one brave enough to tackle such uncommercial subjects as myth, religion and the nature and value of contemplation. If Christ returned, how would he fare in today's world? Many writers have tackled this question, most speculating that, more likely than not, he'd end up in an institution. Harvey is the first to apply this approach to one of the giants of classical philosophy, and she succeeds brilliantly.’ Guardian

‘Harvey's dense, unhurried prose is rich in characterisation and intellectual reasoning. The plot picks up pace when one of William's followers burns down a public library, citing William as his motivation. In an echo of Socrates's trial, William's commitment to his paradoxical ideology is played out publicly, shadowed with potential devastation for the whole family. This beautifully written composition does that rare thing, of provoking free thought while scrutinising the far-reaching repercussions of such a rebellious activity.’ Independent

Evocative and frequently luminous […] [there is] something compelling in the way Harvey resists the easy and the obvious. The result is a novel of both depth and defiance.’ Guardian

‘Samantha Harvey is an audacious writer. The subject of her Booker longlisted debut novel, The Wilderness, was dementia; in her second, All is Song, she looks at the role of philosophy in ordinary life. If that sounds tedious, it isn’t: All is Song is as much about family relationships as it is a novel of ideas. […] Its small cast is compelling. Harvey’s talent is in the details of both characters and relationships that seem trivial but are telling […] [she] is a master of language, adept at both Wildean one-liners and more profound expression.’ Evening Standard

Praise for THE WILDERNESS (2010):

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009; Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009;Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2009; Winner of the Betty Trask Award for a First Novel 2009; Winner of the AMI Literature Award 2009; Named by The Culture Show as one of the 12 Best New British Novelists

‘[In this] exquisite first novel […] which is narrated by a man who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, Harvey explores the strange elasticity of time, and our relation to it: how we might carelessly let years go by without self-assertion or resistance; how we wantonly reshape the past; how we live too much in the past (and yet never enough to satisfy us, because it has so painfully gone.)’ James Wood, New Yorker

‘Samantha Harvey barely puts a foot wrong in telling this crushing tale. It is a piece of literature seamlessly woven from extremely controlled prose, and peppered with vivid images that are recalled with haiku-like clarity. Harvey conjures both atmosphere and beauty, but the impact of this novel comes from its merciless portrayal of dementia. […] Given the unavoidable nature of his progress and the almost unbearable coda Jake's confusion reaches, this could easily have been a depressing read, but a certain levity is maintained throughout. The lucidity with which characters from Jake's past are evoked gives them a kind of fabulous immortality. At its heart, The Wilderness is a seemingly disconnected collection of the narratives that constitute the essence of Jake's life. But it manages to be much more than this: a forensic examination of loss and misunderstanding, a paean to the vital force of stories, and an incredibly moving look at a sword of Damocles that hangs over us all.’ Tom Webber, Guardian

‘[An] accomplished debut […] The lyrical power of these shifting and competing narratives is matched by the absolute emotional realism of Jake’s own desperate plight: his shame and anger and impotence are devastatingly recorded. And yet this is not a depressing novel, but rather one so full of urgent life that it rouses even as it terrifies.’ Olivia Laing, Observer ‘Paperback of the Week’

‘In the glut of novels being published at the moment a really exciting debut is as rare as it ever was. Samantha Harvey's first novel is an extraordinary dramatisation of a mind in the process of disintegration. Jake, 65, is an architect with Alzheimer's, and his memories lie around him in puzzling fragments. He knows that he designed the prison, and that his son is an inmate, but he can't remember why. He can't recall what happened to his daughter, or his wife. He doesn't know which of his memories are real, but some are intact, and Harvey uses these to build a picture of Jake's history. Brilliant - read it now, before it scoops up all the prizes.’ Kate Saunders, The Times

‘[A] brave imagining […] written by a first-time novelist with the steadiest of hands. […] Every life is a mystery, Harvey seems to be saying, even to the one whose life it is. Solve it any way you will.’ New York Times

The Wilderness bills itself as a novel about a man who's losing his mind to Alzheimer's, but it's far more -- or less -- than that. It's closer to Virginia Woolf's meditative novels than anything else I can think of.’ Washington Post

‘[An] astonishingly accomplished first novel […] Harvey skilfully lets the small mysteries of a life of medium tragedies and temporary recompenses unfold for us in a succession of satisfying epiphanies […] Harvey pulls off the most moving dream sequence I've ever read […] I can't describe it, or even characterize it, without ruining it. […] I salute, as well, her true and deeply sad insight that often the things we most want only come to us when they're no longer wanted; and that sometimes the most important truths can only be faced when we no longer recognize what we're facing. Yes, this is a sad book; exquisitely and wisely sad, and therefore a sombre joy to read. What is best about it is that hardest of all things to capture on a dust jacket: acutely observed characters living lives of convincing ordinariness, all of which makes fresh to the reader once again the truth that one individual's particular life just happens to be the perfect stage for dramatizing the universal (with its attendant agony) of each and every conscious life [...] Harvey's novel argues with quiet and convincing force that all of us, when we leave the home of the womb, set up our temporary tents, for life, on the edge of a wilderness.’ Barnes and Noble

 

 

Fiction

Publication DetailsNotes
2018

Jonathan Cape

Oakham, near Bruton, is a tiny village by a big river without a bridge. When a man is swept away by the river in the early hours of Shrove Saturday, an explanation has to be found. Was it murder, or suicide, or an accident? The whole story is relayed by the village priest, John Reve, who in his role as confessor is privy to a lot of information that others have not. But will he be able to explain what happened to the victim, Tom Newman, the wealthiest, most capable and industrious man in the village? And what will happen if he can’t?
Reve is an extraordinary creation, a patient shepherd to his wayward flock, and through his words Harvey creates a medieval world that is in no way alien but almost tangible in its immediacy. His language is modern, but steeped in medieval culture and beliefs.
This is Samantha Harvey’s fourth novel. The previous three appeared on countless prize lists, from the Women’s Prize to the Man Booker. The Western Wind will surely join them.

2014

Jonathan Cape

In the middle of a winter's night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget.

Without knowing if her friend, Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night - a letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred and love. Longlisted for the Fiction Uncovered Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize 2015.

2012

Jonathan Cape

Set against the backdrop of growing national unrest, tabloid frenzies and an escalating fuel crisis, All Is Song is a novel about filial and moral duty, and about the choice of questioning above conforming. It is a work of remarkable perception, intensity and resonance from one of Britain’s most promising young writers.

2010

Jonathan Cape

This astonishing debut novel depicts the desperate struggle of Jake, an Alzheimer''s sufferer, to piece together his few remaining memories. He has many important questions left to answer, but as the disease takes hold and his identity slips away, the concrete facts of his past life become increasingly remote. Can anything be salvaged, in any form, from his deteriorating mind?

Winner of the Betty Trask Prize. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize and Guardian First Book Award.