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    The Harpy
    The Harpy
    The Harpy
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Harpy

    Written by Megan Hunter

    Narrated by Clare Corbett

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Lucy works from home but devotes her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a
    shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, Jake, and he wants her to know.

    The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together but, in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage, she will hurt him three times. Jake will not
    know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take.

    As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime and punishment, Lucy herself begins to change, surrendering to a transformation of both mind and body from which there is no return.

    Told in dazzling, musical prose, The Harpy is a dark, staggering fairy tale, at once mythical and otherworldly, and fiercely contemporary. It is a novel of love, marriage and its failures, of
    power and revenge, of metamorphosis and renewal.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 3, 2020
    ISBN9781980098515
    Author

    Megan Hunter

    Megan Hunter’s first novel, The End We Start From, was published in 2017 in the UK, US, and Canada, and has been translated into eight languages. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Books Are My Bag Awards, longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Awards finalist and won the Forward Reviews Editor’s Choice Award. Her writing has appeared in publications including The White Review, The TLS, Literary Hub, and BOMB Magazine. She lives in Cambridgeshire with her husband, son and daughter.

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    Reviews for The Harpy

    3.5/5

    67 ratings11 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      3 for the story, 5 for the narrator! She nailed it for me, it felt like watching a play.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Megan Hunter’s The Harpy tells a story of grief and revenge. One that will stick in your mind for a few days and also paying homage to Black Swan starring Natalie Portman, The Harpy is everything you hope it would be and then some. Part fairy tale and part revenge tale, Megan Hunter’s The Harpy flies above the rest. A very easy recommendation!
    • 5/5
      This book was fascinating to read. The prose captured me heart and soul
    • 5/5
      Wow. Just... wow. I was immediately pulled into this story. I wasn't sure where the author was taking me but I was happy to go along.

      This is a fairly short book but it packed a big punch for me. I did feel like it dragged a bit in the middle but I listened to the final chapter twice because I wasn't quite ready to be finished.

      Very satisfying. I nearly forgot to mention how much I enjoyed the author's writing style and language choices. And the narrator was fab! I can definitely see myself reading The Harpy again.

      Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the audiobook!
    • 4/5
      Lucy's life is full of raising her two small sons. She's taken a lower pressure job, but she and her husband are secure and building a future together. Then she receives a message from an acquaintance; her husband and his wife are having an affair.Her husband promises to end the affair and as they struggle to repair things, Lucy is left with her overwhelming anger. This is a novel about a woman's anger, about her learning to embrace her anger and how unsettled that makes the people around her. This isn't a comfortable book to read, but it is a fascinating one about the expectations we have for women and for mothers.
    • 5/5
      Lucy is a loving wife and mother of two small boys. Even though she at times regrets not having finished her doctorate, her life is quite close to perfect, at least from the outside. Until she gets a voice message informing her of her husband Jake’s affair with his colleague. Jake immediately admits everything, yet, it wasn’t a single misstep, but actually three. They agree not to give up everything they have built up and Lucy is allowed to hurt him three times, too. What he does not know is that forever, she has been fascinated by harpies, the mythological creatures symbolising the underworld and evil. Thus, Lucy’s revenge is not small but a thoroughly made-up, destructive plan of vengeance.A couple of years ago, I read Megan Hunter’s post-apocalyptic debut “The End We Start From” and liked it a lot, thus I was eager to read her latest novel “The Harpy” which did more than fulfil my expectations. The atmosphere is burning, the idea of the dreadful mythological creatures always looming over the action. Quite often, the harpy is used to depreciate a nasty woman. Lucy can be considered nasty in what she does, however, the betrayal she has to endure is no less harmful.Of course, Lucy’s revenge is the central aspect of the plot. Yet, it is not just their marriage that is under scrutiny, the whole circle Lucy and Jake move in comes to a closer inspection. Superficial friendships which end immediately end when someone does not comply with the unwritten rules, feigned sympathy and kindness – isn’t this world an awful one to live in? Plus the reduction of an intelligent woman to caring mother who becomes invisible as a woman and is considered little more than a domestic worker for the family, a life surely man find themselves in involuntarily. From a psychological point of view, the novel is also quite interesting, depicting Lucy’s transformation from loving housewife to independent and reckless avenging angel. She frees herself from the clichés she has lived to so long and goes beyond all boundaries. A beautifully written brilliant novel that I enjoyed thoroughly.
    • 4/5
      An interesting book with a dreamy feel, well written. The only problem for me is that I never really got a feel into the motivations for any character other than Lucy. That may have been the point though.
    • 4/5
      General info

      This is a story of a woman whose husband cheats on her with an older woman. Who struggles with life after that, trying to forgive and continue life as normal. Who is more than fascinated with the Harpy.

      Things I liked

      The story itself is interesting. I've never been cheated on and I don't have children and I've never been married either. It is interesting to read this story of a woman who experiences all those. I also really like the Harpy. How it is intertwined in the story. The fantasy aspect in the story makes it more interesting.

      Things I did not like

      For me the ending was a bit weird. I could be that it was left for the reader to interpret on purpose. What actually happens. I have my own ideas, but I do not want to give them away. Every reader should make their own interpretation.

      Conclusion

      All in all, this book is interesting and something I have never read before. There is a mixture of reality and fantasy and that creates a mysterious atmosphere. The ending, for me, was a bit unclear.

      * ARC received from the publisher through Edelweiss
    • 3/5
      A harpy is a mythological creature, one with a woman's head and body and a bird's wings and claws. Lucy, our protagonist, has long been fascinated by the harpy, a creature who punishes men for the things they do.Lucy and Jake seem to have a happy life with their two young boys until the day a man calls Lucy and tells her Jake is having an affair with his wife. From then she becomes focused on punishing him three times (this is what they agree).This is a short book but there is so much feeling contained within the pages. Lucy tells her story in a matter of fact way and yet her emotion at Jake's betrayal is almost tangible. It jumps off the page at the reader.I really liked the style of this book, the everyday life punctuated by Lucy's acts of revenge. Where it didn't quite work for me were the mythological aspects, purely because they're just not my thing. I was pleased that they only formed a very small part of the story, just tiny vignettes really, but I would have preferred a less fairytale ending to the one I got. In conclusion, I very much liked Megan Hunter's writing and I enjoyed the way the story played out. I think it was just the right length, any longer and I might have lost interest, but as it was it kept my attention on the volatility of Lucy and the wariness of Jake. It's dark and disturbed, whilst focusing on daily routine and I liked that a lot.
    • 5/5
      The Harpy by Megan Hunter captured my interest immediately but I wasn't sure how well I would like it. But as it slowly gained steam I found myself almost compelled to read on. It ticks almost all of the important boxes for me.I'll start by saying that the writing itself is wonderful. At times almost musical and at times almost too minimalist, yet never going so far in either direction that I lost sight of what was happening in the story. And it is a multi-layered story for one seemingly so straightforward.Most of the book is comprised of the story itself as mentioned in the book description. There are also short sections interspersed throughout that is in Lucy's voice but from some other "place" than the story narration. It is almost like a part of her that is writing her own mythology based on herself and/as a harpy.The harpy is a wonderful choice here. While it is commonly thought of as strictly as a hideous monster, it was often depicted as beautiful creatures early in their history. So there is a definite dichotomy there. In addition, they were viewed as spiteful weapons of revenge and/or as harsh forms of delivering a type justice. Again, this split seems to represent Lucy very well.While the story is about infidelity and what might represent a form of compensation or punishment, it is also about the trauma a child experiences in a violent home. And more importantly the ways that child might cope. We have the idea of "to forgive is divine" while also, at one point, seemingly looking upon the mother as in the wrong (from the perspective of the child trying to survive). That trauma coupled with other events in her life makes what had seemed to be a solid life merely a shaky life with a thin veneer. Once that veneer was lifted at a corner, it was eventually going to come off.The story speaks to trust issues within any relationship, not just marriage. It also speaks to what can happen when something triggers all of the suppressed fear, anger, insecurity, and the many other feelings we hide when we bury our trauma.I highly recommend this to readers who like to read a basic story that has so many layers and connections to the problems of everyday life. There is even, to my reading, a short section that addresses how the instant and repetitive availability of every bad (and good) incident (videos, documentaries, etc on the internet) can feed the internal monsters that begin to eat at us. I also readily acknowledge that some may be put off by the slower (though steadily increasing) pace and the subtle attention paid to the many factors playing into Lucy's ultimate decision/action. The things I mention here, the childhood trauma, life experiences, etc are tossed out almost casually and some readers might not take them into account and simply wonder whether the punishment (three hurts) fits the crime (infidelity). I won't go into detail but I particularly felt the first two fit almost perfectly.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
    • 4/5
      Gorgeous writing! ending was a bit of a cop out but has fascinating and perceptive things to say about marriage, parenthood, patriarchal imbalance and female agency.