Ceridwen Dovey – författare

A brilliant young woman and an older, more powerful man in a tale of slow-burning obsession and retribution - for fans of Patricia Highsmith and Rachel Cusk'This psychological thriller examines what happens when the lines between victim and predator, loyalty and obsession become blurred' Mail on Sunday'Spellbinding' Anna Funder'Precise, cool, complex' Observer 'Striking, stylish, compelling... Her language is perfectly measured, her imagery precise, the settings lush and tactile, gorgeously rendered' Sydney Morning HeraldVita is an undergraduate when she catches the attention of Royce. She is sharply focused, slightly solitary, evidently gifted. Something in her reminds him of his own youth, of the woman he loved then and of what happened to her. So he grants her a scholarship - a transaction that will bind her to him, in subtle and inescapable ways, for the rest of her life.What passes between them haunts Vita for years. She spends her life playing cat and mouse with his shadow, seeing it slip across the mountains behind her, feeling its chill at her back. So when, decades later, Royce gets in touch once again, Vita has her own reasons for responding. He still sees her as the helpless ingénue. But she is not that any more.'Dovey does not shy away from bluntly confronting big questions head-on... Trembling with meaning, unsettlingly alive, a literary page-turner' Kirkus

A literary tour-de-force of power, guilt and obsession - two people stalk each other through the shadowy, tangled web of the past - man and woman caught in a dangerous game of confession, each partly predator and partly prey...'It has been almost fifteen years. I've thought about you often, mostly unkindly. But there: I have thought about you.'Nearly twenty years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget. In his own youth, Royce spent two fateful summers working on a dig in Pompeii with a woman he would later memorialize with a scholarship - the same one that Vita eventually received.From opposite sides of the world, Royce and Vita enter into an adversarial dance: an attempt to settle old accounts. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a thrilling psychological examination of what happens when the lines are blurred between victim and predator, between loyalty and obsession.Praise for Ceridwen Dovey'Strange and richly imagined, haunting and atmospheric... [Dovey] unflinchingly illuminates human nature' The New York Times onOnly the Animals'Painfully beautiful, heartbreaking and riveting... Dovey voices the uncomfortable, she speaks the unspeakable... An ambitious book with a fable-like surface and a whole churning world beneath' Guardian onOnly the Animals

Rarely does a debut novel attract the sweeping critical acclaim of Ceridwen Dovey''s Blood Kin. Shortlisted for two prestigious awards, this tale centers around a military coup in an unnamed country, with characters who have no names or any identifying physical characteristics. Known simply as the ex-President''s chef, barber, and portrait painter, these three men perform their mundane tasks and appear unaware of the atrocities of their employer''s regime. But when the President is deposed, the trio are revealed as less than innocent. A deeply chilling yet sensual novel, Blood Kin illustrates Lord Acton''s famous quip, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," and marks the beginning of an illustrious literary career.

‘I was born in the year J.M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing book with its multiple scenes of torture as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again.’For Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee has ‘always been there’, ‘challenging the rest of us to keep up, resisting our attempts to pin him down.’ Her mother wrote the first critical study of Coetzee’s early novels, uncovering their startlingly original ways of bringing together literature and politics. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this family history to explore the Nobel Prize–winner’s work.

''A sublime gem of a novel'' Hannah Kent, author of Burial RitesFifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they''ve wasted their youthful opportunities. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won''t share what is haunting her. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife''s radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one.The soul searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick – senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US President – turns up dead.Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love – and to ourselves...

‘A sublime gem of a novel’ Hannah Kent, author of Burial RitesFifteen years after graduating from Harvard, five close friends on the cusp of middle age are still pursuing an elusive happiness and wondering if they’ve wasted their youthful opportunities. Mariam and Rowan, who married young, are struggling with the demands of family life and starting to regret prioritising meaning over wealth in their careers. Jules, already a famous actor when she arrived on campus, is changing in mysterious ways but won’t share what is haunting her. Eloise, now a professor who studies the psychology of happiness, is troubled by her younger wife’s radical politics. And Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, has been carrying an engagement ring around for months, unsure whether his girlfriend is the one.The soul searching begins in earnest at their much-anticipated college reunion weekend on the Harvard campus, when the most infamous member of their class, Frederick – senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US President – turns up dead.Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love – and to ourselves...