Never Mind Miss Fox: A Novel

by Olivia Glazebrook

Overview

A gripping and suspenseful novel about secrets, betrayal, and the power of the past.

Clive and Martha have been a couple since they met at university; they now have a young daughter, Eliza, and on the surface, all seems well in their family. But neither Martha nor young Eliza know that the story of this happy marriage harbors a secret scene: a momentary betrayal that could have destroyed the marriage before it even began. Only Clive knows about the trap door in their history but he's convinced that, with the intervening years, the incident has lost its power.

But when Eliza comes home from school one day and excitedly announces that she has a new piano teacher called Eliot Fox, the guise of domestic tranquility threatens to shatter. The enigmatic Eliot Fox knows the secret that Clive is desperate to keep hidden. As her presence in the family's life grows, so too does the ominous shadow of the past that looms over Clive.

Glazebrook's darkly suspenseful tale of a family in crisis reveals how seemingly ordinary lives can contain extraordinary acts of destruction. Told with intensity and penetrating emotion, Never Mind Miss Fox is a compelling tale of guilt, justice, and what it really means to make amends.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316242899
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	08/19/2014
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Olivia Glazebrook was born in 1976. Her first novel, The Trouble With Alice, was published in 2011. She lives in Dorset, England.

Editorial Reviews

06/30/2014
The newest title from Glazebrook (The Trouble with Alice) is a brisk novel crowded with moments of coincidence and convenience. The book’s title character, Eliot Fox, is a piano teacher returning to London after years abroad. One of her first students just happens to be Eliza, the daughter of Eliot’s former friends, Clive and Martha Barkes. This twist of fate propels Glazebrook’s narrative, which shuttles back and forth in time, establishing the relationship between a young Eliot and her pupil’s parents—a vacation to France, an unexpected appearance at Clive and Martha’s college apartment—while also slowly unearthing the dark secret shared by Clive and Eliot. Though Eliza is enamored with her teacher, Clive, fearing exposure, does his best to keep Eliot away from his family, and the ensuing tug-of-war leads to the dissolution of his marriage when his past indiscretions eventually surface. The novel is a fast read, with efficient, lean prose. Still, many of Clive and Eliot’s encounters over the years feel contrived (for example, at one point, of one of Clive’s clients in New York turn out to be Eliot’s lover), and these forced reunions lessen the impact of the novel’s overarching commentary on love, relationships, and folly. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Never Mind Miss Fox is relatively brief—easily read in a single sitting—but powerful. Glazebrook draws strong characters... As the entangled players rush toward a conclusion that will change each of their lives in profound ways, the distressed marriage and mood of sinister suspense are apt to delight fans of Patricia Highsmith and all that is darkly engrossing."—Shelf Awareness

"Glazebrook presents a taut and penetrating novel about how corrosive guilty secrets can be."—Booklist

"Glazebrook's second novel...packs a bit literary wallop... Glazebrook's brilliance as a writer truly shines... A book to savor."
—Mystery Scene

From the Publisher

2014-06-16
A seemingly stable marriage is threatened when a woman from the couple’s past reappears in Londoner Glazebrook’s second novel (The Trouble With Alice, 2013).When Clive fell in love with sophisticated, intellectually ambitious Martha during their senior year at Oxford, she clearly held the balance of power in the relationship. Besotted Clive brought her along on his bourgeois family’s Easter vacation, during which they hung out with his 15-year old brother, Tom, and Tom’s platonic girlfriend, Eliot Fox, an enigmatic mix of willful audacity and vulnerability who charmed the whole family with her piano playing. When Eliot got dangerously drunk, Martha and Clive worked together to care for her. Years later, Clive is a successful lawyer and Martha has left behind her career to raise their precocious, socially awkward daughter, Eliza. When Eliot turns up as Eliza’s music teacher, Clive is thrown into a panic: Will she expose the secrets he's kept from Martha all these years? Meanwhile, Martha has been chafing in her marriage and fantasizing about a life alone with Eliza. Soon, Eliot is ingratiating herself into Martha and Eliza’s lives, leaving Clive to squirm until he finally spills his guilty past to Martha. She is as disgusted as Clive assumed she would be. The two separate. Everyone, including Clive himself and even his mother, considers him a villain. Eliza’s schoolgirl crush on Eliot deepens, while Martha gets a great job offer and carries on a tempting flirtation. Whether or not Clive was ever as much at fault as he assumes, the question stops beingis Eliot manipulating Clive’s family in vengeance against him?and becomeshow far will she go to punish him?Although the hidden incident at the core is predictable and banal, Glazebrook creates an air of faintly comic menace that grows more intense as the novel proceeds.

Kirkus Reviews