A Child's Book Of True Crime

In what The New York Times calls "a striking, ambitious first novel", Chloe Hooper chillingly captures this young woman’s unravelling in an intense, witty, superbly crafted novel.

"A striking, ambitious first novel... Hooper forces open her material so that it resonates beyond itself, and she does this with...curiosity and instinctive grace."  -  Jennifer Egan The New York Times Book Review

Tasmanian schoolteacher Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted fourth grader, Lucien. Her lover’s wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true-crime story about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress in a nearby town. Kate herself has become so obsessed with the murder and so convinced that the published account has it all wrong that she sets about writing her own version — this one for children, narrated by Australian animals. 

Though Lucien’s father brings Kate to life sexually in encounters of escalating eroticism, he cannot dull her obsession. Fixated on the crime of passion, Kate is becoming less and less aware of the present and of how her behaviour may align her fate with that of the dead girl. 

"People don't make this kind of fuss for nothing. Hooper's novel is extraordinary... there's a confidence and imagination in the writing that you rarely see in a first novel."  -  Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Australian

Chilling, erotic and rivetingly suspenseful, A Child's Book Of True Crime marks the arrival of a powerful and startlingly original new voice.