The Stepdaughter

Author: Caroline Blackwood

Format: Paperback

Discover Caroline Blackwood’s darkly brilliant debut – a perfect rediscovered classic for fans of Shirley Jackson and Ottessa Moshfegh

A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation.

J is a lonely woman without the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, leaving J with not only their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but the sulky, cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage.

Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who ‘invites a kind of cruelty’. This is an invitation J fully intends to take up – and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood’s first novel is a testament to her razor-sharp mastery – and mockery – of the darkest depths of human feeling.

‘A bracingly nasty book . . . Splendid, dark, often very funny’ — MEGAN NOLAN, Telegraph

‘Contained and ferocious’ — TLS

‘Punchy . . . a clever and perfectly formed novel’ — The Times

‘One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived’ — VIRGINIA FEITO

‘Witty, observant, clever’ — Guardian

‘The perfect book for people who find Joan Didion too even-keeled, Renata Adler too fair-minded . . . In its own way, it’s a perfect novel . . . It deserves to be a cheeky summer hit’ — LA REVIEW OF BOOKS

‘Blackwood was in fact a writer of rare distinction, the author of wit-drenched books about the wages of class, women’s inhumanity to women, bitchiness, greed, abjection, family, monsters’ — NEW YORKER

‘Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith. Her writing is smart, economical and as dark as night’ — ARAMINTA HALL

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