Mapping The Edge

Anna packs her bags one day without telling anyone where and why she is going - just that she'll be back soon. Her thoughts as she boards a plane, are that this journey will give her time to think about her life - as a woman hitting forty, a journalist and a single mother. She has no premonition that she will become a statistic in a missing person file. Left at home is Anna's beloved six-year-old daughter Lily, her gay friend Paul, who is surrogate father to Lily, and her eccentric best friend Estella. When Anna doesn't return, they make uneasy excuses until, as time passes, the mind-numbing possibility that Anna might not be coming back becomes terrifyingly real. And while those closest to her battle with their imaginations, Anna is on a dark journey - in one scenario Anna is on a ravishing, sexual adventure, on the other, much darker voyage, she is the victim of a stranger's dangerous sexual fantasy. In a masterpiece of emotionally intelligent and nerve-wracking suspense, Sarah Dunant takes us to the very edge.

“This is a tantalising novel, the fictional equivalent to one of those Ayckbourn or Pirandello plays in which different "realities" run parallel to each other...it is always interesting and sometimes remarkable in its stealthy creation of an atmosphere of unease, terror and mystery”

'Part of what makes MAPPING THE EDGE so compulsive to read is that it functions with real confidence and assurance on several levels. Two thrillers are interwoven with the gradually accumulating tension of those left behind, arousing complementary anxieties and exploring the darkness at the heart of Dunant's characters' INDEPENDENT

'Dunant's fiction is trade-marked with heroines who take chances and ignore risks. Not a whiff of political correctness; the rules they make or break are all their own. The subtext of the novel - how loyalties are strained, how relationships change - is every bit as important as the surface excitements. Dextrously done' LITERARY REVIEW

'It is easy to see why Dunant chose the strategy of duelling stories - the missing, by their nature, invite multiple explanations. And she pulls off this difficult narrative trick with considerable technical skill, aided by a clean prose style and a deft hand for characterisation' SUNDAY TIMES

'Its structure dovetails prfectly, making maximum use of all available ambiguities this is more than competent psychological thriller' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Sarah Dunant is the author of the critically acclaimed THE BIRTH OF VENUS. Before turning to historical novels, she wrote seven crime novels for which she won two Silver Daggers. She was editor of War of the Words (Vir. 1994) and co-editor of The Age of Anxiety (Vir. 1996)

Anna packs her bags one day without telling anyone where and why she is going - just that she'll be back soon. Her thoughts as she boards a plane, are that this journey will give her time to think about her life - as a woman hitting forty, a journalist and a single mother. She has no premonition that she will become a statistic in a missing person file. Left at home is Anna's beloved six-year-old daughter Lily, her gay friend Paul, who is surrogate father to Lily, and her eccentric best friend Estella. When Anna doesn't return, they make uneasy excuses until, as time passes, the mind-numbing possibility that Anna might not be coming back becomes terrifyingly real. And while those closest to her battle with their imaginations, Anna is on a dark journey - in one scenario Anna is on a ravishing, sexual adventure, on the other, much darker voyage, she is the victim of a stranger's dangerous sexual fantasy. In a masterpiece of emotionally intelligent and nerve-wracking suspense, Sarah Dunant takes us to the very edge.

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