Whatever You Love

Louise Doughty is the author of eight novels, most recently Black Water, which was published in 2016 to critical acclaim in the UK and US where it was nominated as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her previous book was the Top Ten bestseller Apple Tree Yard, adapted for BBC One as a four-part series starring Emily Watson. Her sixth novel, Whatever You Love, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also won awards for radio drama and short stories, along with publishing one work of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her popular newspaper column. She is a critic and cultural commentator for UK and international newspapers and broadcasts regularly for the BBC. She lives in London.

Doughty creates a haunting, heart-wrenching portrait. Psychologies The opening chapter is electrifyingly painful. From then on the reader is spellbound ... the book is hauntingly believable ... so powerful is the evocation of raw emotion that, the day after i finished it, I woke up with that same feeling. It was some minutes before I realised I was still inside Doughty's book. -- A N Wilson Readers Digest It is an extraordinarly opening, written with such taut understatement that the mother's grief is given a visceral power: we empathise with it immediately ... Whatever You Love is a masterfully constructed novel, at once gripping and tender ... The emotional power of Doughty's prose is such that the reader is complicit in Laura's journey from loss to retribution. Doughty forces us to confront the darkness that lies beneath the skin. The result is a brilliant and brutal novel that continues to unsettle long after the final page has been turned. Observer Absorbing Grazia A stunning tale of grief and the lengths to which a woman must go to come to terms with it. Woman and Home Brilliant, disturbing, heart-wrenching. Daily Mirror