Ever thought about all the people who lived in your house before you? Julie Myerson did, and set out to learn as much as she could about their fascinating lives. This is the biography of a house, the history of a home. It's an ordinary house, an ordinary home, and ordinary people have lived there for over a century. But start to explore who they were, what they believed in, what they desired and they soon become as remarkable, as complicated and as fascinating as anyone. That is exactly what Julie Myerson set out to do. She lives in a typical Victorian terraced family house, of average size, in a typical Victorian suburb (Clapham) and she loves it. She wanted to find out how much those who preceded her loved living there, so she spent hours and hours in the archives at the Family Record Office, the Public Record Office at Kew, local council archives and libraries across the country. Like an archaeologist, she found herself blowing the dust off files that no-one had touched since the last sheet of paper in them was typed. As she scraped the years away, underneath she found herself embroiled in a detective hunt as, bit by bit, she started to piece together the story of her house, built in 1877, as told by its former occupants in their own words and deeds. And so she met the bigamist, the Tottenham Hotspur fanatic, the Royal servant, the Jamaican family and all the rest of the eccentric and entertaining former occupants of 34 Lillieshall Road. The book uncovers a lost 130-year history of happiness and grief, change and prudence, poverty and affluence, social upheaval and technological advance. Most of us are dimly aware that we are not the first person to turn a key in our front door lock, yet we rarely confront the shadows that inhabit our homes. But once you do - and Julie Myerson shows you how - you will never bear to part from their company again. This is your home's story too.

Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House

Biographies & Memoirs

Myerson, Julie

Historical

Harper-perennial

Myerson's third novel, her most uninhibited and powerful, is Amy's story - a journey of sexual desire and her strange relationship with the fat man who rescues her from the past. Amy is a waitress living in Bath. She is married but she also finds men from the park, gives them sex for money and pays it straight into Nationwide. And then the mysterious Harris arrives in the restaurant one day; he knew Amy's mother, who drowned in the Aegean when Amy was just a young girl. Amy is confused but intrigued when Harris demands that she meets his friend Gary, a young fat man he shares a flat with. It is the beginning of a strange relationship that will take them back to Greece, where the past - and all its dark secrets - is confronted. Amy's story is so compulsive and frightening that it is impossible to put down. It is told in a spare and hypnotic prose that will leave you enchanted. Me and the Fat Man establishes this highly acclaimed writer as one of the finest novelists at work today.

Me and the Fat Man

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Harper

Sleepwalking

After her father commits suicide, Susan discovers that her unhappiness is rooted in her dark family history and awakens from an emotional stupor to begin an affair in the eighth month of pregnancy

Perennial

“Bloody brilliant.”—Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
Internationally bestselling author Julie Myerson’s beautifully written, yet deeply chilling, novel of psychological suspense explores the tragedies—past and present—haunting a picturesque country cottage.
Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, have just moved to a cottage on the edge of a small village. The house hasn’t been lived in for years, but they are drawn to its original features and surprisingly large garden, which stretches down into a beautiful apple orchard. It’s idyllic, remote, picturesque: exactly what they need to put the horror of the past behind them. One hundred and fifty years earlier, a huge oak tree was felled in front of the cottage during a raging storm. Beneath it lies a young man with a shock of red hair, presumed dead—surely no one could survive such an accident. But the red-haired man is alive, and after a brief convalescence is taken in by the family living in the cottage and put to work in the fields. The children all love him, but the eldest daughter, Eliza, has her reservations. There’s something about the red-haired man that sits ill with her. A presence. An evil. Back in the present, weeks after moving to the cottage and still drowning beneath the weight of insurmountable grief, Mary Coles starts to sense there’s something in the house. Children’s whispers, footsteps from above, half-caught glimpses of figures in the garden. A young man with a shock of red hair wandering through the orchard. Has Mary’s grief turned to madness? Or have the events that took place so long ago finally come back to haunt her…?

The Stopped Heart: A Novel

United States

Internationally bestselling author Julie Myerson’s beautifully written, yet deeply chilling, novel of psychological suspense explores the tragedies—past and present—haunting a picturesque country cottage.
Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, have just moved to a cottage on the edge of a small village. The house hasn’t been lived in for years, but they are drawn to its original features and surprisingly large garden, which stretches down into a beautiful apple orchard. It’s idyllic, remote, picturesque: exactly what they need to put the horror of the past behind them. One hundred and fifty years earlier, a huge oak tree was felled in front of the cottage during a raging storm. Beneath it lies a young man with a shock of red hair, presumed dead—surely no one could survive such an accident. But the red-haired man is alive, and after a brief convalescence is taken in by the family living in the cottage and put to work in the fields. The children all love him, but the eldest daughter, Eliza, has her reservations. There’s something about the red-haired man that sits ill with her. A presence. An evil. Back in the present, weeks after moving to the cottage and still drowning beneath the weight of insurmountable grief, Mary Coles starts to sense there’s something in the house. Children’s whispers, footsteps from above, half-caught glimpses of figures in the garden. A young man with a shock of red hair wandering through the orchard. Has Mary’s grief turned to madness? Or have the events that took place so long ago finally come back to haunt her…?

British & Irish

Harper Large Print

Susan finds her year-old marriage to Alistair less than ideal. Just as she contemplates leaving him, she discovers that she is pregnant with his child. As she grapples with this news, she learns that her loathed father has killed himself. Left confused and bereft by these developments and haunted by visions of a little boy, she meets a seductive young painter and, despite knowing it could lead to crisis, begins an affair with him in her eighth month of pregnancy. Told with an eye for startling details and an unerring sense for psychological truth, this harrowing, passionate, obsessively compelling literary debut captures the reality of a young woman's inner landscape while spinning a tale that will hypnotise readers to its last satisfying pages.

Vintage

It begins with snow, the story of you. It talks about a freezing room in a student house, a sagging mattress on the floor, and two people, one nineteen, the other twenty, kissing passionately, all night. It is to this scene that, twenty years later, Rosy, the narrator of Julie Myerson's astonishing new novel, returns obsessively. She has just lost a child in a terrible, careless accident, and Tom, her partner, has taken her to Paris to forget about things, to start again. It has snowed in the night and, waking at dawn, Rosy decides to go for a walk. At the hotel desk there's a note for her: 'I'm waiting for you X.' And he is, sitting in the corner of a cafe she enters almost at random. They talk and he touches her. She turns away and when she looks again he is gone. Was he there? Had she dreamed him? And why, when he emails her out of the blue two days later, does he write as though they haven't met for twenty years? "The Story of You" is an account of a woman trying to get by as a mother, a wife, while falling in love with a man from a memory. As always Julie Myerson maps the vagaries of the human heart with extraordinary empathy and precision, while at the same time keeping the reader in breathless suspense and on the edge of tears.

Story of You

Vintage Books USA

The Quickening

A honeymoon couple on a tropical island goes horribly wrong. Acclaimed literary author Julie Myerson writes a tense and terrifying Hammer novella.      Rachel and Dan -- in love, expecting their first baby and also mourning the sudden death of a close friend -- want to go somewhere hot in January. When Dan produces a ring and tells her he's already booked a luxurious resort on Antigua, the holiday turns into a honeymoon. Everything should be perfect. And, at first, it is.     But Rachel's experience of the island soon turns from idyllic to disturbing. As furniture shifts and objects fly around, a waitress begs her to leave, and a fellow guest starts to frighten her, Rachel realises that something sinister is going on. When the waitress is found dead in the hotel grounds, Rachel realises her only hope is to persuade Dan they should leave. But Dan seems to have his own reasons for wanting to stay, and soon Rachel is unable to decide who -- or what -- she should be most afraid of.

Genre Fiction

Hammer

A honeymoon couple on a tropical island goes horribly wrong. A tense and terrifying Hammer novella by Julie Myerson, the author of Something Might Happen and The Story of You. Rachel and Dan want to go somewhere hot in January. Recently married and expecting their first baby, they decide on an island in the Caribbean. Why not turn it into a honeymoon, Dan says? A holiday in paradise. It ought to be perfect. Except that, for Rachel, it's not. Things take a sinister turn as soon as they arrive. As furniture shifts and objects fly around, as a waitress begs her to leave and a fellow guest makes her increasingly uneasy, Rachel realises everything she holds most dear is at stake and nothing is quite as it seems.

Something Might Happen

Literary

JONATHAN CAPE.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Myerson, Julie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Myerson, Julie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Myerson, Julie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House

Me and the Fat Man

Sleepwalking

The Stopped Heart: A Novel

The Stopped Heart: A Novel

Sleepwalking

Story of You

The Quickening

The Quickening

Something Might Happen