Whatever You Love: A Novel [Paperback]

Longlisted for the Orange Prize and Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, Louise Doughty’s hauntingly beautiful investigation of love, loss, and revenge is a literary page-turner that will linger in your mind far after the cover closes. When a hit-and-run car crash claims Laura’s daughter Betty, her life is turned upside down. But when the courts rule the death an accident, the lines dividing justice from punishment will blur as Laura embarks on her own quest for vengeance. Sure to captivate fans of Antoinette van Heugten and Sophie Hannah, as well as readers of Doughty’s previous booksFires in the DarkandA Novel in a Year, among others,Whatever You Loveis a poignant psychological story in which life’s greatest questions hang in the balance.US

I study the photo in the same way that a spy might study the face of a counterpart in a rival organization. I am calm as I make this promise: I am going to find out what you love, then whatever it is, I am going to track it down and I am going to take it away from you.

After the death of Laura's nine-year-old daughter, Betty, is ruled an accident in a hit-and-run, Laura decides to take revenge into her own hands, determined to track down the man responsible. All the while, her inner turmoil is reopening the old wounds of her passionate love affair with Betty's father, David, and his abandonment of the family for another woman.

Haunted by her past and driven to a breaking point by her thirst for retribution, Laura discovers the unforeseen lengths she is willing to go to for love and vengeance.

Gripping, absorbing, beautifully constructed, and written with great sensitivity. -Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

Like Zoe Heller, Doughty is masterful at combining the texture of ordinary, smugly middle-class, contemporary life with the hidden cliff edges of violence and hatred. -Sunday Telegraph

An incident-packed, l3Ú