The Girl On The Landing

Description

Elizabeth has been married to Michael for ten years. She has adjusted to a fairly monotonous routine with her wealthy, decent but boring husband. Part of this routine involves occasional visits to Beinn Caorrun, the dank and gloomy house in a Scottish glen that Michael inherited. There are memories there that Michael will not share with her. But then Michael begins to change. It starts when he thinks he sees, in a picture, the figure of a girl on a landing. As he changes, life becomes so much more fun and Elizabeth sees glimpses of a man she can fall in love with at last. But who - or what - is changing Michael...

Paul Torday was born in 1946 and read English Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. He spent the next 30 years working in engineering and in industry, after which he scaled back his business responsibilities to fulfil a long-harboured ambition - to write. He burst on to the literary scene in 2006 with his first novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, an immediate bestseller that has been sold in 19 countries. He is married with two sons by a previous marriage and has two stepsons and lives close to the River North Tyne.

'The best book of the year...a truly astonishing take on what appears on the surface to be mental illness and turns out to be something far darker' -- Virginia Blackburn SUNDAY EXPRESS 'This is an exciting novel - part love story, part psychological thriller - which confounds your expectations as it tightens its grip.' -- John Koski YOU, MAIL ON SUNDAY 'The story of Michael Gascoigne's strange affinity with the wilderness unravels slowly, tantalisingly...' GUARDIAN 'Torday carries off a surprising, suspenseful update of Stevenson in the 21st-century Jekyll-and-Hyde thriller.' OBSERVER 'Torday is clearly having fun' SUNDAY TIMES 'A highly unusual fusion of atmospheric ghost story and sensitive protrayal of mental illness' GOOD BOOK GUIDE