And she trusts him, doesn't she? But Marisa knows something is wrong, and she is determined to find out why, even if it costs her everything. It's the way she looks at Jake, keeps her toothbrush right next to theirs and constantly asks questions about the baby they are trying for.

Delivery charges may apply.'Completely, terrifyingly BRILLIANT'Marian Keyes, author of Grown Ups 'I didn't want it to end'Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women and Animal 'Magnificent: I read it in one sitting' Kate Mosse, author of The City of Tears When Marisa meets Jake, everything falls into place.īut then their new lodger Kate arrives. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at. Magpie by Elizabeth Day is published by HarperCollins (£14.99). Day’s cleverness lies in fashioning from these ingredients a pacy, stylish thriller in which suspense is accompanied by fist-pumping feminism and, perhaps toughest of all, hope. With its painful uncertainty, extremes of emotion and onslaught of hormones, the struggle to conceive is innately dramatic.

(Should the word “stretched” ever be used in a libidinous context? Let’s agree not.) Cannily, the tense, ultimately cathartic psychological drama that ensues explains away any shakier-seeming aspects of the book’s first section, including a particularly gynaecological sex scene.

It’s hard to do justice to her treatment of these themes without spoilers. Day has written as a journalist about her own experience of miscarriage and IVF this fictional exploration dives deeper still. So far, so domestic noir, but when the viewpoint abruptly shifts from Marisa’s to Kate’s, Magpie becomes an altogether less predictable, more volatile story, one that revolves around the all-consuming longing and sadness of infertility, and the desperate lengths to which it can drive people. When the viewpoint shifts from Marisa’s to Kate’s, Magpie becomes an altogether less predictable, more volatile story Dark-haired and gamine – Marisa’s exact opposite physically – she’s unsettlingly without boundaries, placing her toothbrush beside Marisa’s and Jake’s in the master bathroom, and forever trying to cosy up to Marisa. Their new lodger is 36-year-old film publicist Kate. Too tidy? There’s plenty more to make alert readers worry for her, but it’s when the couple are forced to rent out a room that things really come apart.

Motherhood, she’s convinced, will make everything right. Marisa’s past is blighted by abandonment and abuse.

Magpie by elizabeth day paperback