Susie Boyt - The Small Hours - Little, Brown Book Group
Available Formats
  • Paperback £12.99
    More information
    • ISBN:9781844089130
    • Publication date:01 Nov 2012
  • E-Book £P.O.R.
    More information
    • ISBN:9781405511469
    • Publication date:01 Nov 2012
  • Paperback £7.99
    More information
    • ISBN:9781844088263
    • Publication date:04 Jul 2013

The Small Hours

By Susie Boyt

  • Hardback

  • £14.99

A wonderful and startling novel about the havoc and pain, healing and love that comes with growing up in a family. Like A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith, Susie Boyt is an exquisite writer, thoughtful and truly original.

Harriet Mansfield, brave, wry and handsome, is determined to triumph no matter what. With a decade of therapy under her belt and a new large inheritance, it seems there is nothing she cannot achieve.

So she decides to open the school of her dreams. To her precious little girls, rich in everything but care, she vows to provide the happiest childhoods in the world. For everyone knows that early years passed in delightful ways can set you up for life.

But can this ambitious new departure spill some retrospective sweetness onto Harriet's own harsh beginnings, or better still cancel them out altogether? Will the family she's estranged from ever grant her the recognition she craves?

Written with deep psychological insight and coal-black humour The Small Hours is a stunning meditation on love, self-love and forgiveness, and their shadowy opposites.

  • Other details

  • ISBN: 9781844088256
  • Publication date: 01 Nov 2012
  • Page count: 224
Biographical Notes

Susie Boyt is the author of four acclaimed novels and a memoir, My Judy Garland Life, which was serialised on Radio 4 and will be staged at the Nottingham Playhouse in spring 2013. Since 2002 she has written a weekly column about art and life for the Financial Times. She lives in London with her family.

Darkly funny . . . You can't help wishing that everyone was a bit more like Harriet — Marie Claire - Emma Herdman
The Small Hours excites with refined delights . . . Boyt's economical prose remains elegantly polished, her descriptions of the subtleties of psychotherapy spine-tingling . . . A meaty yet accessible novel possessing great psychological rigour — Sunday Telegraph - Lucy Beresford
An unsettling yet absorbing story — Metro - Ben Felsenberg
Boyt weaves an engaging combination of psychological insight and piercing black humour to produce a thoroughly engaging, thought-provoking story — The Lady - Mel Clarke
An exquisitely written tale of a damaged woman attempting to mend her past with a grand gesture — Psychologies magazine
The Small Hours is an absolute gem of a novel: exquisite, diamond-bright and lacerating to the hardest of hearts — Literary Review - Amanda Craig
Boyt delicately interweaves the revelation of Harriet's past with the unravelling of her present and skilfully leavens the inevitable tragic conclusion with the exuberance and chatter of the girls, who bring as much joy to the reader as their teacher — Daily Mail - Michael Arditti
Boyt has a gift for creating loveable protagonists . . . Boyt has studied Henry James and his stylistic influence is visible, both in the vibrant intensity of Harriet's character and the rich dramatisation of her consciousness — Independent - Freya McClelland
Harriet's pain is clear through the fine mesh of taut and witty prose — Reader's Digest - A N Wilson
A divinely dark book . . . The Small Hours reminds us of the best and the worst of how we treat each other — Sunday Herald - Jackie McGlone
Boyt is a compassionate chronicler of the human heart . . . The point of this novel is not whether your dreams succeed or fail, but whether you're still willing to risk having dreams at all. In Harriet Mansfield, Boyt has drawn a character whose moral and emotional courage is both convincing and heartbreaking — Financial Times - Rebecca Abrams
Author of The Small Hours

Meet Susie Boyt

We caught up with Susie to find out what inspired her to write her latest book — the deliciously dark, moving and sometimes humorous tale of Harriet Mansfield, a damaged woman who seeks to right the wrongs of her own upbringing by giving a school full of precocious little girls the happy childhood she wished she'd had.

Virago

My Judy Garland Life

Susie Boyt
Virago

The Last Kings of Sark

Rosa Rankin-Gee
Follow

Susie Boyt on Twitter

Author of The Small Hours published by Virago. Primsize Chalk.

Susie Boyt

Susie Boyt is the author of four acclaimed novels and writes a weekly column about fashion for the Financial Times. She also works part-time as a bereavement counsellor

Chapter One

The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

Read the first chapter of the latest book in Alexander McCall Smith's Sunday Philosophy Club series. The victim of an important art theft appeals to Isabel Dalhousie, Edinburgh philosopher and sleuth, for help.

Laugh, cry and fall in love

Extract from The Valentine’s Card

The Valentine’s Card is the fabulous first novel from Juliet Ashton. Publishing just in time for Valentine’s Day, it is a heart-warming, heart-breaking tale of love, laughter, and starting over full of vivid characters, real emotions and events both epic and ordinary. If you are looking for something special to read this spring The Valentine’s Card is a MUST. Perfect for fans of Cecelia Ahern, you will laugh, you will cry and you will fall in love with this bright new voice in women’s fiction.

by Amanda Carlson

Full Blooded

Read the first chapter of Full Blooded by Amanda Carlson, the start of an exceptionally fast-paced and irresistibly sexy new urban fantasy trilogy!

Piatkus

A Woman Unknown

Frances Brody
Piatkus

Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job

Robert L. Leahy
Piatkus

What Doesn't Kill Us

Stephen Joseph
Look at

Birds in flight

Read an extract from The Collector of Lost Things by Jeremy Page

Virago

Towards Emotional Literacy

Susie Orbach

Emotional literacy means being able to recognise what you are feeling so that it enhances rather than interferes with thinking - a contrast with emotional expression which can mean one is driven by emotions so that it isn't possible to think.' In this, the second collection of her Guardian columns (one of the longest running and most popular of the paper) Susie Orbach again proves herself to be a clear-sighted and intelligent guide to understanding what's really going on around and within us. Her belief that we must learn how to validate emotion in public and private life remains the cornerstone of her work and has at long last, become a part of public debate.

Virago

What's Really Going On Here?

Susie Orbach
by Val McDermid

The Vanishing Point - Chapter One

It's every parent's worst nightmare - your child abducted while you look on, helpless. But five-year-old Jimmy's life is shrouded in secrets, and his mother will be forced to make the most difficult choice of her life - a choice that will affect everyone around her...

by Mark Billingham

Rush Of Blood: An Extract

Read the first chapter of best-selling Mark Billingham's thrilling new novel 'Rush of Blood'.

Gitty Daneshvari

As a child Gitty Daneshvari talked and talked and talked. Whether yammering at her sister through a closed door or bombarding her parents with questions while they attempted to sleep, she absolutely refused to stop chattering until finally there was no one left to listen. In need of an outlet for her thoughts, Gitty began writing and she hasn't stopped since.Gitty is the author of the middle grade series SCHOOL OF FEAR, SCHOOL OF FEAR 2: CLASS IS NOT DISMISSED and SCHOOL OF FEAR 3: THE FINAL EXAM. She currently lives in New York City with her highly literate English bulldog Harriet. And yes she still talks too much.

Virago

Like

Ali Smith

There's Amy and there's Ash. There's ice and there's fire. There's England and there's Scotland. Ali Smith evokes the twin spirits of time and place in an extraordinarily powerful first novel, which teases out the connections between people, the attractions, the ghostly repercussions. By turns funny, haunting and disconcertingly moving, LIKE soars across hidden borders between cultures, countries, families, friends and lovers. Subtle and complex, it confounds expectations about fiction and truths. 'Ingenious, shimmering fiction, written with a poetic grace that subtly illuminates the tensions between hope and desire, between past and present' Scotland on Sunday

Piatkus

Three Mothers

Sonia Lambert

Three Mothers is a deeply satisfying and rich debut from a talented new voice in contemporary fiction. Fleeing Nazi occupation in Austria, Helene escapes to London, where she meets and marries Charles, a British Intelligence officer. When she is summoned to join him at a posting in India, she is miserably seasick on the crossing, but also pines desperately for the baby she's been forced to leave behind. Twenty five years on, Helene's daughter, Vera, discovers she is expecting a child, and starts to suspect a downside to 'free love'. She begins to question her relationship with her radical, free-thinking husband, as motherhood takes her into uncharted waters of her own.Vera's daughter Susie, now a grown woman, has never been able to understand the animosity that exists between her mother and grandmother. With the terrible news that Vera has been diagnosed with a serious illness, Susie becomes determined to unravel their tangled family history before it is too late. As she delves into the past, she makes some surprising discoveries about the people she thought she knew best...

Virago

Only Human: A Divine Comedy

Jenny Diski

Having seen enough of the results of autonomy and imagination with Adam and Eve, and dull obedience in the shape of the dutiful Noah, God tried once more to infiltrate humanity by seeking a solitary man whose history he could control and develop. Abraham was his chosen one. But accidents happen, unforeseen consequences of the best laid plans. Not even God, it appears, is exempt from jealousy. When the Lord made his final creation on earth, love came along for the ride and caused havoc, even to the Creator himself. Between the way of the world and the way of love, no one is safe. As the Creator and the barren wife wage war, they struggle not only over the affections of Abraham, and control of posterity, but the very notion of truth and storytelling. This brilliant, bitter-comic love story asks awkward questions about the nature of love and faith, and incidentally throws new light on the motivations of our superior Being...