Her (Lane)

Book Reviews
The action in this icicle-sharp British chiller kicks in with an act of civic kindness: A stranger returns a dropped wallet to its owner. Unbeknown to the grateful recipient, an overwhelmed homemaker and toddler’s mom named Emma, the wallet was not in fact mislaid. What’s more, Emma shares a distant history with the well-heeled and effortlessly urbane good Samaritan, Nina, which apparently only Nina recalls..... This is psychological bait-and-switchery to put on the shelf alongside Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon.
Jan Stuart - New York Times Book Review


A small jewel of a suspense novel.
Sherryl Connelly - New York Daily News


Lane does motherhood noir-the noir of nurseries with nightlights and tense twilit bedrooms-as well as anybody.
Marion Winik - Newsday


Keeps the reader perpetually on edge.
Kevin Nance - Chicago Tribune


Harriet Lane is a fantastic writer.... Her thrives in its psychological investigations. The cost of the past, the way we tell stories, and the fascinating power dynamics, resentments, memories and fleeting hopes of these women as they negotiate their lives is wonderfully executed.
Jennifer Gilmore - Los Angeles Times


Her takes a deep dive into the nature of domesticity and asks what womanhood and motherhood mean to the modern woman. What is demanded of them? What do they want for themselves? How does female friendship come into the fore?
Brooke Wylie - San Francisco Examiner


A thrilling, chilling tale.... Lane's keen eye for the intricacies of female relationships - the confidences and competition that so often co-exist in them, for better and worse - extends to the mother-daughter bond, as complicated here as it is inextricable.... The final, heart-stopping sequence in HER juxtaposes a mother's love and fear with a daughter's displaced sense of betrayal and rage. What binds Nina and Emma in the end is desperation, a quality that pulses just beneath Lane's measured, nuanced writing until it slaps us—as it does Emma—in the face, leaving us breathless.
Elysa Gardner - USA Today


[Harriet Lane's] cornered the market when it comes to unassuming but distinctly dangerous, creepy female protagonists….As seductive as it is chilling, Her is quality literary fiction meets psychological thriller.
Guardian (UK)


A taught revenge drama….the endgame, when it comes, is shattering.
Independent (UK)


Lane's writing is always careful and elegant, loaded with significance and often beautiful. Lane follows her debut, Alys, Always, with a gracefully written psychological thriller about friendship wielded as a weapon.
Telegraph (UK)


If you're looking to jump-start the year with a page-turner, Her is your book.
Megan Angelo - Glamour


Affluent artist Nina Bremner glimpses a lovely but disheveled pregnant woman shopping with a toddler one day and experiences a shock of recognition. She once knew Emma Nash—and her hatred for the other woman simmers, though it’s not clear why.... [S]ubtle, deliberate, chillingly effective, and hauntingly sad.
Publishers Weekly


On the surface, Nina Bremner's life seems enviable.... But her ease is set disrupted when she recognizes a woman she knew as a teenager on her street.... [T]he overall creepy factor is high—a tense read for fans of the intellectual psychological thriller. —Devon Thomas, Chelsea, MI
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [T]aut, fraught tale..... With chilling precision, Lane narrates the re-entwining of...two women's lives through domestic details. Afternoon teas, disastrous shopping trips, cluttered homes and even well-populated playgrounds begin to seep with danger.... A domestic thriller of the first order.
Kirkus Reviews