CANR

• The Death of Us - 2025 Viking, New York, NY
• Day One - 2024 Viking, New York, NY
• Girl A - 2021 Viking, New York, NY

• Abigail Dean website - https://www.abigail-dean.com/

  Thanks for visiting.
  Abigail Dean is a writer from Manchester, living in south London. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, the Times and the New York Times. Abigail’s first novel, GIRL A, was an instant Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller. Her third novel, THE DEATH OF US, is out in April 2025. Pre-order here.

  Abigail is represented by Juliet Mushens at Mushens Entertainment, and can be found on Instagram at @AbigailSDean. Feel free to get in touch. She is always happy to talk about writing and books.

• The Women's Prize Trust - https://womensprize.com/abigail-dean-i-want-to-clamber-inside-stories-and-live-in-them/

  Abigail Dean: ‘I want to clamber inside stories and live in them.’
  Abigail Dean has been selected as one of the 10 Women’s Prize x Good Housekeeping Futures authors.
  A panel of industry experts have chosen 10 female authors aged 35 and under who are exciting, boundary-changing, and inspirational. In other words, the classics of tomorrow for today. Below she explains how her debut novel Girl A was published.
  Tell us about the inspiration behind your first novel.
  I’ve long been interested in true crime – the podcasts, the documentaries – but I’ve always wondered about the years after the headlines and the trial. How do people live with trauma, amidst public scrutiny? Is it ever really possible to leave that behind? I’m an only child, and those questions combined with my love for big, fictional families. The family in Girl A may have been made infamous by abuse, but they’re also an ordinary family, with all of the humour, rivalries and grudges of a shared childhood.

  Tell us about your journey to publication.
  I’ve always loved writing. I first sent a manuscript out to agents when I was a teenager, in hard copy, accompanied by a very serious covering letter! At the beginning of 2018, I was working long hours in a law firm, approaching thirty, and realized that I had abandoned writing in favor of something that wasn’t making me particularly happy. I was in the privileged position of being able to take three months off to begin writing Girl A. It was a long, heatwave summer, and I spent eight hours a day in my local library, working on the first draft. I chipped away at the novel for the next year, while I was back at work, and submitted it to agents in 2019. I remember refreshing my inbox at least 200 times a day in those first anxious weeks. The querying process is long and stressful, but this time around, agents were interested. I worked on Girl A for a further five months with my agent, the wonderful Juliet Mushens, and we sent it out to publishers that autumn. When the first offer came through, I was away with work in rural India, with no phone signal, and couldn’t hear a word Juliet was saying!

  Girl A by Abigail Dean
  Girl A
  by Abigail Dean

  Find out more

  What motivates you as an author?
  I love reading, and I hope that my books can inspire some of the feelings I’ve experienced reading other writers’ books. It’s a love that’s almost painful, at times: as if you want to clamber inside the stories, and live in them. In my time, I’ve loved and loathed so many characters, and the idea that someone could feel that way about a character I’ve created is one of the best things in the world.

  What do you think you’d be if you weren’t a writer?
  I like to think that I’d make a great detective, of course; but I think all thriller writers like to think that!

  WP X GH Futures is about celebrating the female voices of the future – what do you hope to have achieved as a writer in ten years’ time?
  I hope to be writing books that people still want to read, books that move and entertain people, and creating characters who stick with them long after the pages are closed.

• The Women's Prize Trust - https://womensprize.com/where-i-write-abigail-dean/

  Where I Write: Abigail Dean
  To celebrate the publication of her new book The Death of Us, we caught up with bestselling author Abigail Dean to ask her about her workspace and to learn more her writing process.
  Where do you write?

  I’m fortunate enough to have a study in my house. The study is painted dark blue and contains a desk, an ergonomic chair, a yellow velvet armchair, and plenty of books. In the morning, it’s a real suntrap, and I’m usually joined by our lazy, loveable cat, Woody, searching for the best patch of sunshine in the house. Although this is my favourite place to write, I try not to be too precious about it; sections of all of my novels have been written in the Notes section of my phone. I also have a laptop small enough to shove into a handbag, which is inevitably a little cracked from being carted around London.

  What do you have on your desk?

  When I’m writing, I keep a pile of books on my desk for inspiration. These don’t tend to be research texts, but fiction which does something I’m trying to achieve, whether it’s a particular atmosphere or sharp dialogue or a great sense of place. When I was writing The Death of Us, it was a pile of love stories, everything from Sally Rooney’s Normal People to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I’m not a particularly orderly worker, so there are also bookmarks, perfume, pens, and glasses I haven’t worn since 2019.

  Which is the most inspiring object in your workspace?

  I have filled the room with art that I love, which tends to be either too frightening or too dorky for the rest of the house. I have a poster from the videogame Final Fantasy VII, which was a childhood obsession and a huge inspiration for my writing. I also have a print by Sarah Coomer, who creates wonderfully eerie images of legends and landscapes, and a photo series by Ibrahim Özvariş, A Lifetime with You, which can be rearranged to tell different stories about love and loss.

  What does your writing process, from gathering ideas to finished manuscript, look like?

  I’m a full time writer now, working four days a week. Each day is bookended by the nursery run, which means there isn’t a great deal of time for procrastination. I’m not much of a planner. I get a sense of whether an idea has staying power by how much I’m thinking about it. If it’s becoming an obsession, something I daydream about and mull over in the middle of the night, then I know it’s worth pursuing.

  I’ll record some notes in a Google Doc and work into that, researching as I go, adding to the plan as the story and characters develop. My first draft of The Death of Us took around nine months; I then shared it with my agent and editor for comments. The duration and extent of edits can vary hugely, and it’s this part of the process that I find most daunting. For The Death of Us, edits took around three months, but for my second novel, Day One, edits took over a year. Inevitably, the excitement of that first draft diminishes: the characters become people you are stuck with, rather than people you’re excited to meet. That said, I still consider being edited a huge privilege. You have a whole team behind you, people dedicated to helping you write the book as well as you possibly can.

  What can you see from your window?

  I live in South East London, so I can see into plenty of other houses, but as of yet, I haven’t had any The Girl on the Train-esque moments of excitement. I can also see the Kent countryside in the distance, and planes coming in to land at City and Heathrow. My son and I like to speculate about where they’ve travelled from.

  Have you ever had a particularly good piece of writing advice?

  I hate to admit it, but the best piece of writing advice I’ve received came from my husband, who I’ve known since we were nineteen. In our late twenties, he was evidently becoming tired of hearing me talk about how much I wanted to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, he said, then you really have to write something. It was said with great kindness, and it remains an inconvenient truth.

• Wikipedia -

  Abigail Dean

  Article
  Talk
  Read
  Edit
  View history

  Tools
  Appearance hide
  Text

  Small

  Standard

  Large
  Width

  Standard

  Wide
  Color (beta)

  Automatic

  Light

  Dark
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Abigail Dean is an English writer, living in south London.[1] She has written the novels Girl A (2021),[2] Day One (2024),[3] and The Death of Us (2025).[4]

  Biography
  Dean was born in Manchester[5] and grew up in Hayfield, Derbyshire. She graduated from Robinson College, Cambridge in 2008[6] with a degree in English literature.[1][7] After her degree she took a law conversion course, eventually specialising in information technology law, in which she has had a career.[1] She worked as a lawyer for Google.[1]

  In 2019 it was reported that Dean received a six-figure sum from UK publisher HarperCollins for her first novel Girl A and another, The Conspiracies. She reportedly received a seven-figure deal from US publisher Viking Press.[8] Girl A was published in the UK in January 2021.[9]

  Personal life
  She works as a full time writer.[10] She lives in South East London with her husband, son and cat called Woody.[10]

  Publications
  Girl A. London: HarperCollins, 2021. ISBN 9780008389055.[11][12][13]
  Day One. Hemlock, 2024. ISBN 978-0008389260.[3]
  The Death of Us. HarperCollins, 2025. ISBN 9780008625610.[14]

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/30/being-an-only-child-made-me-fascinated-by-siblings-i-have-had-to-learn-to-share-my-life

  Being an only child made me fascinated by siblings – and means I’ve had to learn to share my life
  This article is more than 3 years old
  My debut novel is full of the brothers and sisters who were absent through my childhood

  Abigail Dean
  Sat 30 Oct 2021 10.00 EDT
  Share
  People often ask me about my brothers and sisters. They have read my debut novel, Girl A, and they expect to find my own family, encrypted in the fiction. There are seven siblings in the Gracie family in my book and between them there is caustic rage, begrudging respect, tenderness and cruelty. Too much love and too little.

  I don’t have any brothers and sisters. That’s the thing about writers, I would like to reply, bolder than I really am. They make things up. Me, I’m nowhere to be found. Although that isn’t quite the case.

  On one side of my family there is a history of siblings and on the other there are only children. My mother’s family is characterised by crammed festive tables; by three ice-creams a day on holiday and a cousin who once received an actual lump of coal for Christmas. My father’s family is the realm of the only children. Here, there were vast, empty houses, padded by feline companions. There were weekend visits to graves. With ease, the dead outnumbered the living.

  But that’s the line that won out. I was a large, furious baby, decimating tissue and sleep. By the time I slept through the night, my parents were tiptoeing around their new, rejuvenated lives and everybody was too relieved to consider a second one.

  I was never spoilt with stuff; I’m still the person who loses out on those perfect loafers, because I was trained to spend a week considering if I really, truly want them. But God, I was spoilt with time. I spent the first four years of my life with my mother, curating collages from magazines and choosing the book I wanted to read from my shelf. When I started at the village primary school, I cried for a month. I struggled, haplessly, with my tin of reading words and, to my horror, the teacher didn’t have six hours a day to dedicate to my conquering them.

  I liked to read stories of siblings, to add myself to the families
  Being an only child leaves you soft, I think. The world of adults isn’t necessarily kinder than the world of children, but it’s certainly more polite. I came to the classroom expecting that everybody would indulge my eccentricities, my animal facts and stories. That people would want to hear absolutely everything I had to say. As it turns out, nobody wants that and five-year-olds least of all. I cut a strange, gullible figure in the playground. Nobody had ever been mean to me and when they were, I couldn’t quite believe it was happening.

  There were always stories, though. As soon as I mastered the reading tins, I liked to read stories full of siblings: to join the Weasleys at the Burrow and the Marches in Massachusetts. I added myself to their families, to their vast Christmases and shared jokes. And when I could write, I created my own novels of families; stapled pages of A4 sealed with the logo of my latest publishing house. I had a bounty of time and I didn’t have to worry about Amy March throwing my manuscript on the fire. As soon as I had finished these works, I would present them to my parents, who read them immediately, of course, and adored them.

  When I was little, my parents would sometimes go for dinner and I was expected to be asleep by the time they came back. A forgettable babysitter sat downstairs with the television on louder than usual.

  I never slept. I smelt my mother’s perfume in the landing, like an early ghost. I lay in bed waiting for their voices in the hallway, when I would know, for certain, that they had not died in a car accident on the way home. When they checked on me, I obediently feigned sleep, because there are few things more embarrassing than loving somebody too much.

  There was something selfish in this love, of course. There was the suspicion that nobody else would ever love me quite so much, but that applies to most of us. More than that, there was the terror of being entirely alone. If my parents died, I thought, I would be sent away; and I wouldn’t be sent away like the Pevensies, evacuated together to swan about Narnia. No. I would be sent away by myself, with little sense of adventure, either to an orphanage, or to my grandparents’ house in Gloucestershire; the house of the only children, which was always dark, even on a midsummer afternoon.

  I am much less lonely than I was then, but this fear has never quite gone away. It has only matured. I’m still preoccupied by the thought of my parents dying. I see myself at the church doors, alone. There will be nobody to recall their peculiarities and without that, I worry about losing the fondness that comes with death. Who’s going to know about the day that my father put diesel in the hire car and swore in front of me for the very first time? Who’s going to remember my mother’s enduring quests for a swimming pool on holiday, whatever the budget, so we once found ourselves jammed in a hotel bath in Seville, trying to cool down?

  And here is the guiltiest fear: not death, but the absence of it. My maternal grandmother did not die of Alzheimer’s for many years and in those years my mother and aunt shared the black, black humour found in the corridors of care homes and hospitals; in the ring of the phone, at a time when nobody you know is awake. Will I be able to do it, I wonder – if the time comes? And not just to do it, but to do it graciously, with humour and to do it alone.

  It’s never taken much for me to fall into the lives of others
  I wasn’t an easy child to teach and I am not particularly easy to love. ‘Your definition of compromise,’ my husband said, ‘is talking about something – and doing what you intended to do in the first place.’ This didn’t seem particularly impractical; it once surprised me that anybody would do things differently. When we moved in together, my assumption was that we would live according to my family’s lore. This was the time I ate dinner and this was the time I went to bed. Here were my books, arranged in alphabetical order by the author’s surname; and he could add his, provided we created a divide between fiction and nonfiction.

  The men I loved always tended to come from big, sprawling families. There were houses full of brothers, too big for their rooms. The front door would open and nobody would know or check who had just arrived. I would sit in the midst of things, fascinated by the noise and the slights. If somebody had broken one of my CDs, I would have cried, or else taken an ear. Here, things were resolved in minutes, with cheerful violence. There was a whole abundance of shared jokes, a line from a film or a parental mishap, which became familiar over time. Familiar and forbidden. To raise them myself would have been mortifying: this much, I knew. This was not my native language and I would never lose my accent.

  But for writing, this outsider perspective was useful. There is so much pleasure in writing not just about things that you don’t know, but about things that you can’t know; doors that are long-locked in reality, but can be nudged apart by your imagination. I imagined living in houses like these, surrounded by siblings and bustle. It’s never taken much for me to fall into the lives of others – a parted curtain of a dark evening can do it – and here was an opportunity to create my own siblings. Some of them were cruel and some of them were tender. All of them were mine.

  If I’m to be found anywhere in Girl A, it is here. The Gracie family doesn’t come from something I have, but from something I don’t.

  What’s useful for writing isn’t necessarily useful for a relationship. But I’m told that I’m improving. I appreciate the value of a pint midway through a walk, rather than insisting that we wait for the end of it. I can see the value in watching a film for the fifth time on a Sunday afternoon, the pleasure to be found in awaiting the best jokes, rather than hearing them anew. To our bookcase, we added an ‘unread bookshelf’, a stalwart of my husband’s shelves. I have acknowledged that this, if nothing else, is a better way of doing things.

  All through my life, there have been times when I will tell people that I’m an only child and they will act surprised. You don’t write like an only child, they say; your novel, it was all about siblings. Or, you don’t seem like an only child. This is well-meaning at best and ignorant at worst. It is exactly who I am.

  Girl A by Abigail Dean (HarperCollins, £8.99) is out now. Buy it for £8.36 from guardianbookshop.com

January is traditionally the month to launch a big fiction debut, and Girl A (HarperCollins) is set to be one of the biggest. The subject of a fierce nine-way auction in the UK, this first novel has sold in 26 territories to date--including a seven-figure deal with Viking in the US--with TV rights snapped up by Sony Pictures Entertainment. Girl A grips the reader from the first page-I sat down, planning to read the first 50 pages but was unable to stop until I finished the whole book-but is also more nuanced and emotionally complex than a brief synopsis might suggest.

The novel is narrated by Lex (Alexandra), the "Girl A" of the title, now a fully functioning adult and a successful lawyer based in New York. But as a child she lived in northern England, with six siblings in a home dubbed the "House of Horrors" by the press. Back then Lex, the eldest, managed to escape and flag down a passing motorist. Her father committed suicide before he could be arrested, but her mother, Deborah Gracie, was convicted of terrible crimes against her children. Now her mother has died in prison, bequeathing Lex and her siblings the family home. As executor of the will, Lex is called back to England and must make contact with her adult siblings-all adopted by different families after their horrific upbringing-and somehow come to terms with their shared past.

Over the phone from her home in south-east London, Abigail Dean tells me she began thinking about Girl A while she was working for a law firm. She had just turned 29 and come to the realisation, she says, "that I had lost a lot of my twenties to being behind a desk". After a particularly demanding month at work, when she barely saw daylight and missed her husband's birthday celebrations on a Saturday night, she decided to resign and take some time to do what she always wanted to do: write. While reading English Literature at Cambridge, she had initially planned to be a journalist, rather than a lawyer, before a brief internship at Tatler put her off the idea. (Amusingly, she was dispatched to Oxford Street and given half an hour to purchase a pair of "perfectly white" socks for her boss, before he swanned off to Paris Fashion Week.)

Local inspiration

The inspirations for her first novel were varied. Dean tells me of a long-standing interest in true crime, and memories of travelling as a child from her home in the Peak District into central Manchester on a train which, as her dad pointed out at the time, passes both the house shared by the Moors murderers, and Harold Shipman's surgery. There were two more recent cases "that, as I was starting to write Girl A, were in mind" she says. In 2017 in Minnesota, a young teen escaped from her male captors after nearly a month, and found the strength to swim across a lake to safety. A year later, in California, the parents of the Turpin family, whose photographs projected a happy family life, were revealed to have been shackling and starving their 13 children--something that only came to light after a 17-year-old escaped from the house and raised the alarm.

Dean started to think about how these crimes, and the attendant publicity and media attention, might continue to affect the victims as time passes. Girl A opens with the line: "You don't know me, but you'll have seen my face", an acknowledgement of how crimes can 'live on' online. Dean explains she was interested in writing a book that "deals less with the intricate details of the terrible things that do happen, and more with how trauma is processed and the ghosts of the headlines, many years later".

She also wanted to write about the relationship between siblings, and the book's closest relationship is between narrator Lex and younger sister Evie. An only child, Dean says that she grew up "wondering what it was like to have a sibling" and observing the love/hate dynamic between her friends and their brothers and sisters.

Girl A is cleverly structured, moving back and forth seamlessly between Lex's life in the present, and the childhood she survived. "I hope it's useful for the reader to have the comfort of going back to the present and knowing that Lex is OK; she's not great, but she is OK. It's one of the reasons [Lex's] escape is in the first chapter ... so it's not hanging over the novel. [The escape] is not the point of it."

Gradually, a picture builds in the reader's mind of the neglect and abuse, which is all the more powerful for not being explicit. It was a fine balance, she admits. "When I read other novels that dealt with abuse or difficult crimes, I always tended to find things more affecting and more moving when the reader is allowed to use their imagination, rather than being forced to consume specific images that the author is pressing upon them. I found the parts that I'm interested in are more the tenderness that comes after, or the moments of humanity." Later, she adds: "I didn't want it to be a novel about abuse, and about suffering. It is meant to be a novel about humanity and hope."

In a three-month gap between leaving her old job and starting a new one, she worked on Girl A every day at Dulwich Library. When she started a full-time role as a lawyer for Google, she "chipped away" at the novel in her spare time for the next nine months. When the time came to find an agent, she did her research diligently (including taking out a subscription to The Bookseller) and found five whose lists indicated she might be a good fit. Three agents expressed strong interest, but Girl A found a home with Juliet Mushens, who impressed Dean by telling her the novel needed "a good few months' editing" before it was ready to go out on submission to publishers.

Dean is already working on her second novel, The Conspiracies, about the aftermath of a terrorist attack, but she has no plans at present to write full-time. Being a lawyer is not only fascinating, she says, but also helps with the novel-writing. "The ruthless attention to sentences and words [in contracts] and how they can be interpreted ... Everything you write, you've got to think, 'Well, that could be analysed in court some day.'"

Dean writes with a pile of books on her desk "so whenever I get stuck, I can read a few sentences of someone else's incredible novel". Particular favourites include Cormac McCarthy's The Road ("I definitely found some inspiration there in terms of the incredibly tender relationship in the midst of catastrophic circumstances") and Kazuo Ishiguro's novels. "His narrators. they say so much with what they don't say. I'm sure there will be people who read [Girl A] and think that Lex is a relatively cold narrator, but I hope that people see it's more that she is subdued. There's a lot she gives away in what she holds back, rather than what she specifically discloses."

Metadata

Imprint HarperCollins

Publication 21.01.21

Format HB (14.99 [pounds sterling]), EB (7.99 [pounds sterling])

ISBN 9780008389055/0008389079

Rights 26 territories to date, including the US

Editor Phoebe Morgan

Agent Juliet Mushens, Mushens Entertainment

Book Extract

You don't know me, but you'll have seen my face.

In the earlier pictures, they bludgeoned our features with pixels, right down to the waist; even our hair was too distinctive to disclose. But the story and its protectors grew weary, and in the danker corners of the Internet we became easy to find. The favoured photograph was taken in front of the house on Moor Woods Road, late on a September evening. We filed out and lined up, six of us in height order and Noah in Ethan's arms, while Father arranged the composition. Little white wraiths squirming in the sunshine. Behind us, the house rested in the evening light, shadows spreading from the windows and the door. We were still, and looking at the camera.

It should have been perfect. But just before Father pressed the button, Evie squeezed my hand and turned her face up towards me; in the photograph, she is just about to speak, and my smile is starting to curl. I don't remember what she said, but I'm quite sure that we paid for it, later.

Alice O'Keeffe

@aliceokbooks

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The Stage Media Limited
http://www.thebookseller.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
O'Keeffe, Alice. "Girl A, the novel that was the centre of a bidding frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic, looks set to catapult Abigail Dean into the bestseller lists." The Bookseller, no. 5896, 4 Sept. 2020, pp. 20+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635044729/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b45f478b. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

Girl A. By Abigail Dean. Feb. 2021.352p. Viking, $27 (9780593295847).

They were a cause celebre, the six Gracie children, when the police discovered them in chains, filthy, malnourished, and in critical condition. Their father committed suicide before the police arrived; their mother survived to be sentenced to 25 years in prison. As this remarkable novel begins, 15 years have passed, and the mother has died, naming as the executor her oldest daughter, Alexandra, known to the family as Lex and to the authorities as Girl A. The estate consists of 20,000 pounds (the novel is set in England). Lex quickly decides that the family home, known locally as the House of Horrors, should be transformed into a community center, but to do that she will have to get her siblings to sign off on the idea. Will she succeed? Told in Lex's arresting first-person voice, the novel moves back and forth in time, revealing the siblings' ghastly childhood and their current condition. In the process, Dean does a brilliant job of character development, starting with Lex herself, who is now a successful attorney--thanks partially to the years of therapy necessary to deal with her memories and with her monstrous father. Lex is a fascinating study in abnormal psychology, and the novel is, altogether, a tour de force, beautifully written, richly imagined, and compulsively readable. Add to this its grave, sometimes ominous tone, and the result is unforgettable. --Michael Cart

YA/M: Older teens with a literary bent will find this extraordinary, character-driven novel compelling reading. MC.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Cart, Michael. "Girl A." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 7, 1 Dec. 2020, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A647835775/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=69826169. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

Girl A

by Abigail Dean

HarperCollins, [pounds sterling]14.99, pp. 336

If the last quarter of 2020 saw a glut of novels published, of which there were winners (Richard Osman) and losers (in a just world, Piranesi would still be at number one), January is a less frenzied time for new writers to launch. Even so, there are often hyped and hot new books--among which this year Girl A is one.

It comes with excitable reports of huge international sales and an insistence that it will be everywhere. The accompanying blurb also manages to mention repeatedly that the author got a double-first at Cambridge, which, frankly, in these days of being ruled by Oxbridge inadequates who think that being there for three years means everything must be immediately handed to them, I would probably have skipped: the novel is better than the entitlement suggests.

Girl A is a lovely, precision-tooled piece of kit. It has traces of Emma Donoghue's Room and Lisa Jewell's The People Upstairs, two books dealing with the worst thing any of us can imagine: imprisoned, tortured children hidden in plain sight.

Oddly, even though it deals in an obscenity, it's actually easier to swallow than crime novels where women and children are casually slaughtered to prove how clever the police officer is. There is nothing casual about what happens here, and the victims are the heroes, in the most difficult, compromised ways imaginable.

It's sharp and refreshing to have a female heroine who doesn't have to be sexy and feisty. We never even learn what Alexandra looks like, and I found, unusually, I desperately wanted to know.

The shape of the novel is neat: after the death of the mother who stood by while her children were abused, the eldest, Alexandra, (or Girl A as she is referred to in newspaper reports) has to contact her surviving siblings and work out what to do with the house in which they all suffered. We follow the children's varying trajectories, flash back to when things got so bad, and see how the horror played itself out over the decades.

The writing is clean and compelling, the choices interesting and fully fleshed out. The flashbacks are upsetting but not torture porn. More affecting are things in the outside world Alexandra cannot understand: why people would ever stop eating at a buffet; why they wouldn't enjoy being in hospital, or why the nurse has to keep her face turned away.

It seems odd to describe such a book as profoundly entertaining, but stories have always dealt in gore and death and this is no exception. It's terrific: finally, an Oxbridge graduate succeeding in doing something really, really well.

Sepsis, 2020

Nobody told me how it would feel
To get home, out of the cold,
How blue the human sky would seem

When I came back from the far sea,
How wild the intervening roads.
Nobody told me how it would feel

To meet the half-dead testing the green
Heresies of lesser worlds,
How the blue human sky would seem

Baroque to them. I still hear in dreams
Their nonsense speech, their nothing words.
Who knows how they must feel,

Trapped in their grief along the putrid streams,
Among the poisoned groves? Absurd,
How blue the human sky would seem

To them, how fiercely they would weep
Under the sun, the curtilage of gold,
For nobody told them how it would feel,
How blue the human sky, how clean.

--Polly Walshe
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Colgan, Jenny. "House of horrors." Spectator, vol. 345, no. 10039, 16 Jan. 2021, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A649331523/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a997f06b. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

GIRL ABy Abigail Dean

A teenage girl breaks a bedroom window and drops to the ground, then starts to run. For days, she has practiced what she will say when she finds help: ''My name is Alexandra Gracie, and I am 15 years old. I need you to ring the police.''

Lex must have a long trek ahead of her; surely the house where her parents have kept the girl and her six siblings hostage is isolated and remote. But within seconds, Lex is running past other homes. Her neighbors were just down the road, almost in earshot, the whole time our narrator was chained to her bed.

''I screamed, trying to summon them from their living rooms, from their sofas, from the evening news,'' she recalls. ''Festive lights hung from trees and over front doors, welcoming their inhabitants, and I thought, stupidly: Christmas.''

''Girl A,'' Abigail Dean's debut novel, shares a kinship with Emma Donoghue's ''Room'' and Alice Sebold's ''The Lovely Bones'' in its harrowing portrayal of trauma. Like those titles, ''Girl A'' is certain to rouse strong emotions. It is a haunting, powerful book, the mystery at its heart not who committed a crime, but how to carry on with life in its aftermath.

By the opening chapter, the crime's perpetrators, Lex's father and mother, are, respectively, shot dead in a kitchen and about to be buried in an unmarked prison grave. Their children have wildly different fortunes. Each chapter is named for one of them, a canny structure that gradually moves the spotlight of Lex's attention across her family. The siblings are sharply drawn and distinct, their ties weighted with rivalry, guilt and betrayal, the novel operating partly as a meditation on the vagaries of birth order.

After their escape, the siblings are placed in different adoptive homes, where they receive varying levels of love and support. The luckiest must be Noah, the baby, raised by affectionate parents with no memory of his past. The position of unluckiest is hotly contested. Perhaps it is Ethan, the eldest, who capitalizes on his family's notoriety, writing a newspaper article on ''The Problems With Forgiveness,'' which, Lex observes, ''were many and predictable.'' Or perhaps the least fortunate is Gabriel, the ''troubled'' one, or Delilah, who seems suspiciously healed, having ''surpassed Survivorhood and reached Transcendence.''

Or is the unluckiest Lex herself, Girl A, the one who escaped?

Now a lawyer based in New York, Lex is good at her job, has friends and lovers, can afford spritzes and weddings abroad, but also seems utterly exhausted by the effort of resilience. As a narrator, Lex never tries to win over her audience, or to present herself as plucky or heroic. Her tone is controlled and understated; the flatness is effective but highly unsettling.

Early on in their captivity, the children watch their parents cover the windows and remove the clocks from the house, ''old disorientation techniques.'' Lex finds that her sense of time remains unstable. As short chapters swing between the past and present, you long for more forward movement -- for the heavy weather to break. But that frustration seems deliberate on Dean's part, mirroring Lex's own rage to escape her past. And the suppressed tension acts like the winding back of a slingshot, which about halfway through the novel suddenly rockets forward, propelling the story through scenes of genuine fear to its moving, pitch-perfect ending.

I kept wanting to read ''Girl A'' as a fairy tale or parable, to cauterize some of the suffering in its pages, but Dean resists that impulse at every turn, always rooting Lex's story in the real. Dean looks squarely at the sort of parents who humiliate their children, or hit them, or deny them food, and the consequences of such monstrousness. In one heartbreaking scene, Lex recalls how during her first holiday in her adoptive home, she ''ate Christmas,'' waking in the night and stealing down to the dark kitchen to devour the cheeseboard, the gingerbread men, the fruitcake. Faced with the crumbs, her adoptive mother loses her patience. As in life, even the heroes in this novel have their breaking points.

Except, perhaps, for Lex's adoptive father, who is good as gold, and whose compassion illuminates the novel. Lying on a trampoline beside his adult daughter, he recalls dreams in which he meets her as a child: ''You were tiny. Just 6 or 7. Long before I could have known you. They started off as nice dreams, really. But then there would always be the moment when you would have to go. It was like I knew all along that it was coming. And somehow -- somehow I knew what you would have to go back to.''

The reader shares his aching sense of powerlessness. Dean tells this story with such nuance and humanity, you're desperate to step into its pages. To help.

As adults, Lex and her sister Evie imagine an alternate childhood for themselves, in a house on a beach, filled with books. Evie asks:

''Do they know how lucky they are?''

''No. I don't think so.''

''I wish I could tell them.''

''No. Let them be.''

Flynn Berry is the author of the novels ''Under the Harrow'' and ''A Double Life,'' and the forthcoming ''Northern Spy.'' GIRL A By Abigail Dean 352 pp. Viking. $27.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: ''Girl A'' is Abigail Dean's debut novel. (PHOTOGRAPH BY Nicola Thompson Photography FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Berry, Flynn. "House of Horrors." The New York Times Book Review, 28 Mar. 2021, p. 10(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A656509260/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c9915a0. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

The Death of Us

Abigail Dean. Viking, $30 (336p)

ISBN 978-0-593-83113-7

A DIVORCED COUPLE reunites for the sentencing of the serial killer who shattered their lives in this moving literary thriller from bestseller Dean (Day One). Thirty years ago, the South London Invader broke into the home of playwright Isabel Nolan and her husband, lawyer Edward Hennessy The couple made it out shaken but alive; their relationship, however, never recovered. Decades later, the Invader--retired policeman Nigel Wood--has been caught, tried, and convicted, and Isabel and Edward, now in their 50s, are preparing to deliver victim statements before his sentencing. The story mostly unspools through Isabel's testimony, in which she recounts her and Edward's tumultuous marriage and addresses her assailant with all the emotion she no longer dares to share with her ex-husband. Her decision to publicly out herself as a victim of the Invader helped bring the killer to justice--and helped her find her voice as a writer--despite protestations from the fiercely private Edward. That rich dynamic, plus a poignant subplot about the orphaned daughter of one of the Invader's victims, add texture and novelty to the narrative. As in her two previous works--Girl A, which focused on an adult survivor of parental abuse, and Day One, which depicted the aftermath of a school shooting--Dean transforms tragedy into art with surgical prose and a steely gaze. It's a triumph. Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (Apr.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Death of Us." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 5, 3 Feb. 2025, p. 150. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300764/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=27fa607a. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

Dean, Abigail THE DEATH OF US Viking (Fiction None) $30.00 4, 15 ISBN: 9780593831137

A London couple struggles with the aftermath of a violent crime and an upcoming trial.

In a sea of thrillers that feel dishearteningly similar or too reliant on shocking twists, this book stands out, not only for its propulsive energy but also for its riveting, unorthodox examination of the devastating aftermath of violence. Isabel and Edward, a young married couple in London, learn the truth of this firsthand. In 2001, a man who will become known as the South London Invader breaks into their home. He forces Edward to tie up Isabel and drags him to another room, then returns to the bedroom to assault Isabel. The couple survives the attack--later, as the Intruder's crimes escalate, other victims will not be so lucky--but their marriage eventually crumbles, annihilated by trauma, fear, and Edward's inability to discuss what happened (particularly to him). Twenty-five years later, a retired police officer named Nigel Wood is on trial for the rapes and murders, and Isabel and Edward, now divorced and in their 50s, find themselves repeatedly thrown together as they wait with other victims to give their statements in court. But though it touches on the courtroom drama, this is not a legal thriller: Dean focuses on the years before and after the attack, revealing how violence exposed cracks in the marriage and destroyed the lives of all involved. She doesn't tell the harrowing story in chronological order, but the narrative is easy to follow, and she builds a startling level of tension as the moment nears for Isabel and Edward's testimony. She invests readers not only in the outcome of the case but also in the fates of two people split apart by terrifying events outside their control.

An intriguing thriller that explores the toll violence takes on its victims.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Dean, Abigail: THE DEATH OF US." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325493/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=85cc754c. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

O'Keeffe, Alice. "Girl A, the novel that was the centre of a bidding frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic, looks set to catapult Abigail Dean into the bestseller lists." The Bookseller, no. 5896, 4 Sept. 2020, pp. 20+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635044729/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b45f478b. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. Cart, Michael. "Girl A." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 7, 1 Dec. 2020, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A647835775/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=69826169. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. Colgan, Jenny. "House of horrors." Spectator, vol. 345, no. 10039, 16 Jan. 2021, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A649331523/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a997f06b. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. Berry, Flynn. "House of Horrors." The New York Times Book Review, 28 Mar. 2021, p. 10(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A656509260/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c9915a0. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. "The Death of Us." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 5, 3 Feb. 2025, p. 150. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300764/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=27fa607a. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025. "Dean, Abigail: THE DEATH OF US." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325493/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=85cc754c. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593295878
  Word count: 222

  Day One
  Abigail Dean. Viking, $29 (368p) ISBN 978-0-593-29587-8
  Dean (Girl A) depicts the fallout from a school shooting in this extraordinary literary thriller. During a primary school play in the coastal English enclave of Stonesmere, a gunman opens fire, killing more than a dozen people, many of them children. The resulting media storm opens up the door for Sandy Hook–style conspiracy theories to take root. Examining the aftereffects of the tragedy on Stonesmere’s tight-knit community, Dean zeroes in on two characters: Marty Ward and Trent Casey. Marty is the town’s star soccer player and the daughter of Ava Ward, a teacher who was killed in the massacre; Trent is a lonely young man who briefly lived in Stonesmere before leaving to move in with his mother’s new husband, and who now falls under the sway of a right-wing media charlatan peddling theories that the tragedy was a politically motivated hoax. What emerges is a complex, gutting portrait of communal grief and crushing isolation, which builds to a moving and unexpected climax. Though Dean’s stark prose steers clear of sensationalism, some readers may find the unflinching subject matter hard to stomach. Those willing to take the plunge, however, will be rewarded with an unforgettable triumph. Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (Mar.)

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/17/and-thrillers-of-the-month-review-moral-injuries-christie-watson-day-one-abigail-dean-the-last-murder-at-the-end-of-the-world-stuart-turton-finding-sopie-imran-mahmood
  Word count: 940

  Crime and thrillers of the month – review
  This article is more than 1 year old
  Three doctors’ enduring bond is put to the test in former nurse Christie Watson’s thoughtful first thriller, while Abigail Dean dissects a school shooting in a month littered with big hitters

  Alison Flood
  Alison Flood
  Sun 17 Mar 2024 04.30 EDT
  Share
  Christie Watson is the first in a handful of big name authors with new thrillers out this month. Winner of the Costa first novel award for her debut, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, she is a former NHS nurse who has also won acclaim for her memoir, The Language of Kindness. Moral Injuries (W&N), her first thriller, is a thoughtful, darkly gripping look at the lives of three doctors – Olivia, Anjali and Laura – who met in medical school and have stayed friends through all the twists and turns their jobs have thrown at them. In their 40s now, Olivia and Laura with teenage children, they are forced to remember a night from their youth, when the three of them did something that has cast a long shadow over their lives ever since.

  Watson is, unsurprisingly, brilliant on the reality of working in the NHS, and the strain and reality of the trio’s jobs (Olivia is a surgeon, Laura an air ambulance doctor, Anjali a GP) is brought to riveting life. She is also excellent on betrayal, female friendships and family, and what we might do to protect it. I was so caught up in it all I had to flick ahead to the end to calm myself down. I don’t recommend doing that – but I do recommend Moral Injuries.

  Christie Watson.
  View image in fullscreen
  ‘Darkly gripping’: Christie Watson. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
  Next up is Abigail Dean, author of the bestseller Girl A, about a girl who escapes from her family home after years of abuse. Her second novel, Day One (HarperCollins), tackles an even more shocking crime: a school shooting in the Lake District, where a teacher dies trying (and failing) to protect her primary school pupils. Dean shows us Marty, the teacher’s teenage daughter, carefully peeling back the layers to show what really happened that day, revealing how the tragedy played out for her. “For months after my mother died, I would come to fever-wet and smelling of the worst of myself, sweat and mouth. It was my mother who had changed the sheets.”

  Dean also gives us Trent, an outsider who gets caught up in the conspiracy theories swirling around the shooting, showing how a lonely young man might get drawn into this world. Dean writes beautifully and Day One is an absorbing, heartbreaking read. I just found it a little too heartbreaking – we return again and again, from different perspectives, to the scene of the shooting, and my heart repeatedly shattered for these children. I had to keep putting the book aside, returning when I felt strong enough.

  On an island surrounded by fog that has destroyed the rest of the planet, Turton’s characters have 92 hours to solve a murder
  Stuart Turton has already published two very different books: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which he describes as a “Groundhog Day murder mystery”, and The Devil and the Dark Water, a historical thriller set on a ship. His new book, The Last Murder at the End of the World (Raven Books), is something else again. It is set on an island surrounded by a fog that has destroyed the rest of the planet – a place inhabited by 122 villagers and three scientists known as the Elders. The hugely inventive mystery begins when one of the scientists is found murdered – the first murder the villagers have ever seen. Her death triggers the lowering of the island’s security system that keeps out the fog, and there are only 92 hours to find a solution or the fog will sweep in and kill everyone. The only problem is, everyone’s memories have also been wiped. Turton is excellent at slowly revealing the details about this post-apocalyptic world and its inhabitants. I won’t give anything else away as the discoveries are part of the joy, but I was engrossed in this high-concept thriller and can’t wait to see what Turton does next.

  We’re back in today’s society with Imran Mahmood’s Finding Sophie (Raven Books), in which Harry and Zara’s 17-year-old daughter, Sophie, has been missing for weeks and the police investigation has gone cold. Her desperate parentsinvestigate themselves and become obsessed with a reclusive, highly suspicious neighbour. Mahmood moves between their perspectives as he shows how they take matters into their own hands; he also outlines a trial at the Old Bailey, the details of which are gradually made clear.

  Finding Sophie is a great thriller as well as a moving look at parental grief. “My child is 17,” says Zara at one point. “She’s not dead. But she has been missing for eight weeks. Those last weeks have been like drowning. Every day. Not drowning. Like being held under water.” I frequently wept while reading it but couldn’t put it down.

  To order Moral Injuries, Day One, The Last Murder at the End of the World or Finding Sophie, click on the titles or go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

  This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025. The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media.

Word Count