The Furies

When Alex Morris accepts a former professor’s offer to fill a sudden vacancy at an Edinburgh school for troubled teens, the last problem the young London stage director anticipates is having too powerful an impact on her students. But that’s precisely what happens when the Greek dramas she assigns start to resonate with her fierce, yet fragile 15-year-olds—with life-shattering consequences—in Haynes’s haunting debut novel. Though Haynes read classics at Cambridge, nothing in her resume as a comedian, journalist, broadcaster, and children’s author (The Great Escape) quite sets the stage for the book’s emotionally raw characters—especially Alex and her would-be acolyte, Mel, who struggles to make sense of a capricious world despite profound deafness—as they march inexorably toward the fog-shrouded precipice. Cleverly plotted, cannily paced, and unafraid to pose questions that don’t have easy answers, this accomplished psychological mystery demonstrates the way that sometimes it may take being lost in the darkness to enable us to glimpse the light. [em]Agent: Patrick Walsh, Conville and Walsh Literary Agency (U.K.). (Aug.) [/em]