This is a very thought-provoking little novella, which would make a good book club book to discuss many ideas about marriage middle-class life, woman's rage, etc.

I didn't get along with the writing style a lot, but I appreciate the unique style of the writer.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

The Harpy by Megan Hunter is set in a pretty typical town. Lucy and Jake live in a nice home with their two sons. Lucy is a stay-at-home mom while Jake works at an office. Their life is nice and comfortable. It could be wrapped up in a nice gift box with a lovely bow.

Then one day Lucy receives the news that her husband is having an affair with a co-worker. She doesn’t know what to do except cry and be angry. Finally, Lucy decides to give Jake another chance.

They come up with this deal that she is allowed to hurt him three times in whatever way that she wants. People say that sort of thing during in an argument. What are the statistics on following through with inflicting pain on someone that has caused you pain? I guess that why there are so many shows like Snapped and Forensic Files.

So things are going alright for awhile. Definitely not perfect but they are trying to make the relationship work.

In between thinking about the relationship and taking care of her kids, Lucy remembers her fascination with Harpies. A Harpy is a half-bird, half-human creature. The most accurate description of them is that they are agents of punishment.

Anyway, Lucy discovers that Jake cannot be trusted. So she may have turned into Harpy – either in her mind or in a physical way. Lucy seems happy in this form. Maybe she feels free because this is her true nature – an evil, vicious bird. It may not work for everyone but maybe it will work for her. I hope she finds someone to take care of her kids while she’s off finding her true Harpyness.

If you are looking for a good book with plenty of drama and Harpies, then The Harpy should be the next book on your list.

If you are a cheater or have a fear of birds, also known as ornithophobia, then you have other problems that you should attend to first.

I received this ebook from Netgalley in exchange for doing a review. All opinions are my own. Obviously.

i’m not sure if this was me being disenchanted with books at the moment or if this actually wasn’t very good. I just had little to no connection with the main character in this story. I thought the plot and story was interesting but rather unbelievable or inauthentic? I’m not sure. The tension between why she stayed and hurt him as opposed to just leaving was not fleshed out, so I just thought that was all a bit weird? I get that it was showcasing a toxic, dysfunctional relationship but I think it was just this lack of understanding of Lucy’s motivation. Perhaps that’s just me. I wanted to know why she was choosing to stay and harm her husband when everyone around her knew she had been cheated on, when he was probably continuing this relationship, when their relationship was so weird and toxic that I was barely sure they had ever had actual feelings for each other? Was it because of her kids? Was it because she wasn’t making much money, so didn’t have the power to leave? I guess there were hints but tbh maybe I just didn’t want to read something so bleak/grim right now idk. I think the concept could have been really good but I feel like the whole book needed more roots? There was clearly something that made me read to the end, and I did read it quite quickly. I’m not sure. The writing was really interesting, highly atmospheric. And I enjoyed the way in which Lucy was still holding on to the academic life she had lost through the Harpy and how she came to identity herself more and more with the creature.

The Harpy is a dark, emotional story with sinister undertones throughout.

Lucy's world falls apart when she discovers her husband has been having an affair. In its aftermath, her early childhood obsession with harpies slowly fuses with her everyday reality.

Lucy's voice is strong and compelling throughout as she draws readers into her dark world of betrayal and revenge, pulling us towards an almost inevitable conclusion.

Hunter's writing brilliantly captures moments of the everyday. Small moments of parenting: birthday parties, bike rides and bedtimes were set against unsettling moments of magical realism.

I absolutely devoured this in an afternoon.

I loved Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From so I was really excited to read this.

The Harpy is a quiet book, but with an undercurrent of dread. You know from the opening that Lucy is performing an injury to her husband, Jake, and later discover this is one of three acts of pain she is “allowed” to inflict on him as penance for his extra-marital affair.

Megan Hunter’s writing is so compelling it is almost slippery. I knew as soon as I started this book I would read the whole thing in one sitting. I just couldn’t stop reading. It’s lyrically beautiful too - her balance of these two elements in her writing is incredible. Moments feel both nuanced and wholly-realised.

This is a quick read but at no point did I feel myself rushing. Instead I wanted to savour each word - I wish there had been more.

I fell in love with Megan Hunter’s lyrical prose in The End We Start From but for me, this domestic, yet occasionally mythic, dark and horrific plot is very much my wheelhouse.

The tug and pull of married life taken to extremes.

Lucy receives a call from a man claiming her husband, Jake, is having an affair with his wife. Confronted, Jake strikes a bargain with Lucy: she can hurt him three times in return.

Hunter gets into her character's head, musing on marriage, parenting, and being parented. She wisely limits the word length, leaving the reader wanting more.

Not fond of excessive use of italics.

A satisfying, if mildly disturbing read.

Lucy has been obsessed with harpies since a childhood book first introduced her to the idea. The novel tells us the story from her first person perspective; her husband has cheated and to even the score they agree she can hurt him three times.

I am very much of the opinion that once you've cheated the relationship is finished. Not that old 'once a cheater always a cheater' though, I do believe leopards change their spots for the right person. So to me right from the start I have zero respect for Lucy for not booting that jackass husband out the door... but then that would be a short and pointless story.

The writing gives a claustrophobic, sinister atmosphere to the book, and Lucy seems to thrive, if not enjoy that type of environment. I imagined the house to be small and dingy, like a place with the curtains permanently closed.
There's something desperate and broken in Lucy and their agreement has given her a sick kind of power over her husband.

The pace ramps up as we follow Lucy's swift descent and I have to say I'm glad the book was a short one because it was not for me. Not at all.

The Harpy is a novella about the drabness and dullness of middle-class marriage, female rage, and revenge. This would be a good pick for a book club.

The plot follows a middle-class British couple, Lucy and Jake. Jake is a university researcher and Lucy has abandoned her PhD to be a stay at home mother. She has been obsessed with harpies since childhood. The plot is easy to summarise: she finds out Jake is cheating on her, and they make a fairy-tale deal: she will be permitted to ‘hurt’ Jake three times.

I liked the author’s previous book but didn’t love it. I felt the same about this one. I think it is very hard to write about domestic life - you know, your basic "Revolutionary Road" existence - boring shit sex, obsessive cooking and grocery shopping, skincare routines, judgemental playground mothers, and most memorably, children’s birthday parties where God forbid you don’t give them shitty plastic costumes to wear, or vegetables on plates that only the snobby vegetarian kid eats. These bitchy parts were really fun to read. It sounds (forgive me) absolutely soul-killing and no wonder poor Lucy is going out of her fucking mind. I thank God my bohemian hippie parents raised me unconventionally, as this book (along with Richard Yates, and Pete and Trudy Campbell’s marriage on Mad Men) makes me VERY FUCKING AFRAID about having children.

A verbal tic in the book is to refer to the cliché depiction of affairs, as the narrator frequently imagines how a woman in a film would react, in the same situation. “All those stupid, broken, fictional couples on television, not even able to find their own original language. And here we were.” It’s a clever move on the part of the book, to openly acknowledge a problem: writing about adultery is tough because it’s a topic that’s been done to death. I’m not sure if the novel completely escapes from the issue just by acknowledging it, though.

My main critique of the novel is that I wish it had been a bit more surprising. Even the three acts of revenge chosen by Lucy felt a bit paint-by-numbers - things you would expect someone to do as revenge. What if she had chosen to do something that didn’t seem like an obvious form of revenge? Ultimately, there were lots of missed opportunities throughout this to go to deeper, darker places IMHO. Like the scene at the birthday party for the son: is the son repeating/reflecting the parents’ own tendency to violence? Or when Jake initiates sex with Lucy a few weeks after she’s publicly shamed him via work email - boy, this would have been interesting to explore - the husband enjoying his wife’s revenge on him - instead of his more typical reaction of “you’re appalling, how could you do this to me, etc.). Or when the husband of the wife Jake is sleeping meets Lucy in person - what a missed opportunity to do something dark and strange with this character! What if he and Vanessa had been doing the same kind of game, for instance? What if he and Lucy had been more strongly established as foils for each other?

Overall, a solid read that is well accomplished at what it sets out to do (i.e., tell a story about adultery). But I found myself hungering for something that felt a little less safe and less explicitly spelt-out. The last few pages of the book were what felt most alive to me - surreal and daring, like the ending of the movie "The Witch." After you transform into a harpy - become all appetite, all rage - what do you do? Where do you go?

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley.

This is quite a short book, more a novella really, which I managed to read in an hour and a half.
It is the story of Lucy and Jake, a married couple with 2 children, whose marriage begins to come apart at the seams when Lucy receives a phone call out of the blue telling her that Jake is having an affair.
Lucy has been intriuged by the myth of the harpy since she was a child, studying it to almost PHD level as an adult, and she becomes obsessed with the punishing Jake in the way that the harpies would have punished wrong doers in Ancient Greece. Part of the myth relates to how the once beautifu harpies become ugly and warped by the vengeful punishments they mete out.
Lucy is on a downward spiral and for me, the book was an allegory on the mental health breakdowns that can be brought on by extreme stress (like finding out your husband is cheating on you).
I thought the book was okay, but I wouldn't rave about it.

There are spoilers in this review.

Megan Hunter’s ‘The Harpy’ is a an unsettling and gripping read. I think this novel will draw comparisons with Oyinkan Braithwait’s “My Sister the Serial Killer” and Amy Arnold’s “Slip of a Fish” on the basis that these are recent novels which explore ideas about women as perpetrators of abuse and/or violence. I could definitely see this novel being nominated for the Booker Prize.

Lucy is in her mid- thirties and lives in a small rented house with her husband Jake Stevenson and their two children, Paddy and Ted. Jake is an academic (biology) and Lucy is a freelance copywriter who once studied Classics. Lucy isn’t particularly happy. Lucy is a woman who is forced to fulfil the banal tasks of every day life, the tasks that she is expected to carry out as a mother and wife: cooking meals, organising Christmas and birthday parties. On top of that, Lucy is dissatisfied with her job, having once worked at a university press.

Lucy then finds out that Jake has been having an affair with a woman from his department, Vanessa, who is older and also an academic. After Lucy finds out she is both hurt and angry and begins abusing her husband as a form of revenge. The violence escalates to the point where Lucy causes significant harm to Jake.

There is some really beautiful writing in this novel such as when the narrator reflects on Lucy not knowing that her husband is cheating: “She doesn’t know. She knows hardly anything. Her skin is clear, unlined: she is only midway through her thirties. Not beautiful. Not exceptional in any way. But she has this: her lack of knowledge, stretching from this moment into forever, hers.”

I also really liked the way that Hunter slowly explores multiple facets of violence and the ways in which violence slowly escalates. We learn Lucy’s father abused her mother which Lucy witnessed and we also know that Lucy is angry; “there is a trail of anger flowing through my bloodline, from my great-grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me.”

The novel refers multiple times to Lucy’s self-professed obsession with the mythological creature of the harpy. This begins when Lucy was a child and carries on to Lucy’s research at university:

“When I was a child, there was a book – out of print now, expensive – about a unicorn who went into the sea and became a narwhal. The book had beautiful illustrations, dark blue seas, peach-pale evening skies. But the picture I remembered best was of the harpies, dark shadows, birds with women’s faces, who came down to torture the unicorn, to make him suffer. I asked my mother what a harpy was, and she told me: they punish men for the things they do.”.

The novel documents Lucy’s transition to a voyeur and then a perpetrator of violence following the revelation that Jake has cheated on her: Lucy becomes a harpy.

“I watched tsunamis, bodies of water that were able to bring down buildings, to lift and carry cars, sweep away a city like the wipe of a cloth”. “I could see that there were legitimate cravings for violence, and repugnant ones; watching news footage, at the time, was acceptable. Watching it five or ten years later was not. Reading true-crime books, listening to podcasts about mass murder: all fine. Watching a video of a man dragging his bleeding friend down the street, listening to the audio of a school gun attack, a plane going into a building, over and over again: these were signs of disturbance.”

Violence of course isn’t straightforward. Lucy becomes a perpetrator of violence but running through the novel is the sense that society causes figurative violence to women by forcing them to behave in specific ways; the violence of womanhood, marriage and motherhood. Although the novel never justifies the harm that Lucy causes, the novel tells us Lucy has every right to be angry.

With thanks to Picador and Netgalley for a digital arc of this book.

This was a very gripping read, I found myself racing through the last 30 or so pages. I almost wish it was longer or in particular the last part of the book was expanded, as I feel like that part is where the author really took off. The main character is deeply troubled, with themes of infidelity and abuse throughout. I sympathised with her more than I thought I would, but wish more questions were answered. Overall I recommend people check this out, it’s well written and gripping and handles the topic of marriage infidelity in a way I haven’t really seen before

I wanted to love this story so much more than I did. The focus on the mythology of the harpy by Lucy reminded me a little bit of Grief is the Thing With Feathers in a way, and it just reminded me more of how much I loved that book, and this felt a little lacking in comparison.

It was a pretty quick read (I read it in a day), and the character of Lucy is really well written and developed, but it felt to me like the story was just scraping the surface of greatness. I don’t know what could have been added, but it was frustrating to read when felt that more could have been written or expanded on to improve it as a whole. It felt like the story was 75% of the way there, and it just needed something extra to push it the rest of the way.

I rated this three stars because I enjoyed the writing style, and it started off fantastic, but by the end it kind of lost me.

Beautifully written. A captivating tale of revenge, betrayal and desperation. Lyrical prose flows off the page to encapsulate everything it is to be broken.

I read this in one sitting and found myself completely absorbed in Lucy’s trauma.

Highly recommend.

The Harpy is a novel that's very much wedded to its concept - there is no world- or character-building that doesn't fit into its central metaphor.

It makes for a quietly simmering exploration of betrayal and revenge, heavy with tension - there are some lovely lyrical passages, and striking domestic tableaux. But it also limits the parameters. I always felt I knew what was coming next. The story is never quite as compelling, quite as gothic as I hoped it could be - and therefore the magic realism of the transformation falls a bit flat.

The Harpy is a concentrated examination of its theme, clever and close if limited in its scope.

An exceptionally raw and riveting tale that consumed my mind, body and soul - I've never read anything quite like it.

In The Harpy, Megan Hunter confronts the mundane and the mythical in a plot that is sharply turned on its head. When Lucy learns of her husband's shattering infidelity, a special arrangement is agreed to even the score and save their marriage. Lucy can hurt him three times, but Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take. But as the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to an otherworldly transformation of both mind and body.

In this novel of love and betrayal, revenge and renewal, Hunter interprets the seamless, unsettling blending of mother and monster through a metamorphosis rich with female rage and myth. Told in a beautiful, lyrical prose, each sentence spoke volumes and imbued a signature, solid flair so distinctive to Hunter, that I savoured every word, individual detail and turn of the page, unaware of the passing of time.

Also, never have I seen such a stunning book cover. It, in itself, is a masterpiece.

The Harpy is dark, twisted and a real treat. There is mythology, some very messed up human beings and an excellent creepy sense of ‘where is this going?’.
I loved it. Highly recommend.

The author captures the destruction of a relationship, fractures, splinters of glass slicing bonds, and leaving bloodied bodies in its wake. The narrator Lucy had always felt an affinity with Harpies, since encountering them in a story book as a child. Wild, mythical monsters with the head and body of a women, winged with talons like a bird. Their role to punish evildoers.
Lucy is incredibly intelligent, but lost. And the author delves into the subject of women stepping away from their degree and career to raise children. That point where they become invisible. Unseen.

This close look at a fractured marriage, made me think of swimming in the sea. The sting of saltwater finding any paper cuts, the dull, pungent smell of rotting seaweed lying in the sun. Grains of sand scouring your skin until it feels raw.
This novel reminds me in parts of the darkness in SALT SLOW, and THINGS WE SAY IN THE DARK, so if you've loved them I would highly recommend this!

Amazing on so many levels. One liners that took my breath away mixed with a powerful storyline. I loved the way the elements of fantasy (The Harpy as a mythical creature) were weaved so expertly into the plot. I felt every one of the main characters feelings and it left me reeling in parts and cheering at others. I really enjoyed The End We Start From but I think this one totally tops it. I will be recommending you anyone looking for a good read.

This is a very short novel and easy to read in no time at all but there is quite a lot packed into so few pages. Whatever your thoughts on The Harpy, I highly recommend you stay the course till the end. It is truly mind bending. This book is like a prism, bending the light. At times, it is high fantasy with a mythical harpy swooping and terrifying. Other times Lucy is just an unremarkable everywoman, a mother lost in the mundane with all the same fears and insecurities that go along with having young children. By the end nothing is at all how it seems, to the reader or the character. I was reminded of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, hats off to Megan Hunter.

A dark and atmospheric take on infidelity. At some times the prose is sparse and dreamlike, at others it is raw and visceral. This duality is partly what makes the book so successful, you swing between feeling abject sympathy for the main character and feeling utterly uncomfortable with her. The book nods towards both the Classics and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, whilst feeling like it has something new to express about the ‘wronged woman’.