Trade Paperback
Mrs March
By Virginia Feito
‘Nastily good fun’ Metro
SET TO BECOME A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING ELIZABETH MOSS
Shirley Jackson meets Ottessa Moshfegh meets My Sister the Serial Killer in a brilliantly unsettling and darkly funny debut novel full of suspense and paranoia
George March’s latest novel is a smash hit. None could be prouder than Mrs. March, his dutiful wife, who revels in his accolades and relishes the lifestyle and status his success brings.
A creature of routine and decorum, Mrs. March lives an exquisitely controlled existence on the Upper East Side. Every morning begins the same way, with a visit to her favourite patisserie to buy a loaf of
olive bread, but her latest trip proves to be her last when she suffers an indignity from which she may never recover: an assumption by the shopkeeper that the protagonist in George March’s new book –
a pathetic sex worker, more a figure of derision than desire – is based on Mrs. March.
One casual remark robs Mrs. March not only of her beloved olive bread but of the belief that she knew everything about her husband – and herself – sending her on an increasingly paranoid journey, one
that starts within the pages of a book but may very well uncover both a killer and the long-buried secrets of Mrs. March’s past.
A razor-sharp exploration of the fragility of identity and the smothering weight of expectations, Mrs. March heralds the arrival of a wicked and wonderful new voice.
”'I read Mrs March in one sitting and was so captured by it … As a character, [Mrs March] is fascinating, complex, and deeply human” - Elisabeth Moss
”'Feito nods deftly to her forebears - there are shades of Hitchcock and Highsmith here … while the opening chapter puts one in mind of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway … Nastily good fun” - Claire Allfree, Metro
”'Virginia Feito’s noirish debut novel left me rapt, gleefully ambivalent about her eponymous protagonist: did I like her? Did I find her funny? Did I want to hug her? Was I bit a scared of her? Did I relate to her? To all of the above: yes … an elegant, claustrophobic psychological thriller that feels incredibly original” - Evening Standard
”'What a rancid little book, I absolutely loved it” - Alice Slater
”'The atmosphere of queasy foreboding is compelling, as is the portrayal of a flawed, troubled and complex individual trying to keep it together while coming apart at the seams” - Economist
”'A brilliantly tense psychological study from a writer who keeps pace with the grandees she invokes - Du Maurier, for one … Feito has done that most horrible, wonderful and truly novelistic of things: she has seen right through Mrs March and into the shameful, petty, maggoty secrets that everybody carries” - Guardian
'A delicious, disorienting study of suspicion, societal pressure and shifting identities, brilliantly rendered. I swallowed this tale down as greedily as if it were Mrs. March's beloved olive bread' Rachel Edwards, author of Darling -
”'Gloriously grotesque: tormented by the desire for glossy magazine perfection; cruelly judgemental; frantic to believe the world revolves around her. And yet Feito makes her guilt-inducingly relatable…The gothic awfulness of her predicament reminds you of Ottessa Moshfegh’s grand guignol creations and lurid descriptive talents; Shirley Jackson’s claustrophobic horror” - The Times