A Narrow Door: A Novel

by Joanne Harris

Overview

An electrifying tale of psychological suspense and revenge at an elite grammar school where secrets run deep.

"A dark world of emotional complexity and betrayal, where twist follows twist and nothing is what it seems."—Alex Michaelides, bestselling author of The Silent Patient

"Exhilarating. Addictive. Fierce."—Bridget Collins, bestselling author of The Binding

"A psychological thriller you can't put down and an antiheroine you won't forget."—Harlan Coben

?***

Now I'm in charge, the gates are my gates. The rules are my rules.

It's an incendiary moment for St Oswald's school. For the first time in its history, a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to girls.

Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered.

But Rebecca is here to make her mark. She'll bury the past so deep it will evade even her own memory, just like she has done before. After all, you can't keep a good woman down.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639363667
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	02/14/2023
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	261,422
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Joanne Harris is an Anglo-French author, whose books include twenty novels, three cookbooks, and many short stories. Her work is extremely diverse, covering aspects of magic realism, suspense, historical fiction, mythology, and fantasy. In 2000, her 1999 novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is an honorary Fellow of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, and in 2022 was awarded an OBE by Queen Elizabet II. Her novels A Narrow Door and Broken Light are also available from Pegasus Books.

Editorial Reviews

"Joanne Harris’s previous novels set at the tweedy British boarding school St. Oswald’s embodied the spirit of a fierce chess match. The icy rage and ruthless revenge is turned up even higher in A Narrow Door, in which St. Oswald’s, long a boys-only domain, is dragged into the current century with the appointment of its first headmistress in its 500-year-old existence. To the chagrin of the elderly Latin master Roy Straitley, Rebecca Buckfast’s arrival not only portends change, it leads to the excavation of secrets from St. Oswald’s depths — namely, the literal unearthing of a long-buried body. Readers will learn the dead person’s identity, but the novel’s most shocking revelations have to do with the loss of one woman’s agency and the means, however terrible, even monstrous, through which she can reclaim it."

Sarah Weinman

★ 11/15/2021

In 2006, Rebecca Buckfast, the protagonist of Harris’s enthralling third thriller set at St. Oswald’s (after 2016’s Different Class), becomes the first female head in the Yorkshire school’s 500-year history. Before her appointment, St. Oswald’s was a bastion of male entitlement. Under Rebecca’s reign, girls have been admitted and change is in the air. At the building site of the new sports hall, four of Latin master Roy Straitley’s students see what might be a body, partially submerged in a muddy sinkhole. They tell Straitley, who takes the matter to Rebecca, but he senses that she already knows about the body. With Scheherazade-like skill, she tells Straitley her tale, teasing out the story over the coming weeks. Rebecca’s account of the devastating effects that her older brother’s disappearance had on her family, and events that subsequently took place in 1989 when she was a substitute teacher at his grammar school, alternate with excerpts from Straitley’s 2006 diary. Harris keeps the suspense high all the way to the exhilarating ending. This spectacular feat of storytelling will seduce the reader from page one. Agent: Michael Carlisle, InkWell Management. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly