Private Parts of Women

From the award-winning author of Honour Thy Father: Who’s a threat to whom in this “spine-chilling” novel of split personality? (The Times, London).

Inis has no interest in finding out who she is. She wants to discover who she isn’t. One day, in her least favorite month of February, Inis bleaches her hair, abandons the husband and children she loves, and closes the door forever on family, marriage, and her comfortable suburban London home. There, she was safe, appreciated, and loved—and she hated every minute of it.

Now she’s ended up in a dreary little flat in the grey, post-industrial town of Sheffield. Here, in the neighborhood of Mercy Terrace, Inis is being watched. There is the boy who steals things, and plays until he gets hurt. There is Inis’s neighbor Trixie, an eighty-year-old hymnist for the Salvation Army who grows hyacinths, and enjoys afternoon tea. And Ada, who lives to be desired. As Inis watches them, she fears they share more than this shabby dead-end street. As four people’s lives begin to converge, Inis gets increasingly nervous—because she’s not certain which of them, herself included, could be dangerous to the others. Or which one will survive.

Lesley Glaister’s novel of multiple-personality disorder was inspired by Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil. As Glaister tells it in the Independent: “I was 10 when I read [it] . . . I was fascinated by the idea of 16 different personalities being packed into one body with one face. I remember longing to suffer from the same problem.”

“A stream of consciousness thriller, well worth reading twice” —The Literary Review