The Artful Anna Harris

The spirit of Patricia Highsmith lives on in Maton’s impressive debut about an obsessive young teaching assistant. After a prologue that teases an unidentified dead body on a beach, Maton introduces Anna Harris, a TA who lives with her fiancé, Ben, in a small English town. Ben longs for a child, but after a second miscarriage, Anna refuses to try again. She forges an intense friendship with the alluring Sofia, a renter in town, that recalls Anna’s former bond with a woman named Pippa, which disintegrated when Pippa left for university and ended with Pippa’s death. After Anna’s friendship with Sofia begins to fall apart, Sofia, too, dies in a fatal accident. Enticed by the opportunity to slip into Sofia’s shoes, Anna takes on her dead friend’s identity and begins a relationship with a man named Mark while maintaining her engagement to Ben. When a chance encounter reveals to Anna that Mark is just as duplicitous as she is, with a long history of defrauding women, she tries to end their affair—but Mark threatens to expose her. Anna’s cool, unreliable narration calls Tom Ripley to mind, but Maton freshens up familiar tropes by giving her protagonist uncommon dimension. The result is irresistible. Agent: Caroline Hardman, Hardman & Swainson. (July)