The Housekeeper

Melanie Wallace

From Shelf: The 2007 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist

When Jamie Hall finds a boy tied to a tree and cuts him loose, she can have no idea of the desperate chain of events her act of humanity will trigger. Tense, passionate and unflinching, this is a novel of tenderness and relentless momentum.

When Jamie Hall finds a boy tied to a tree and cuts him loose, she can have no idea of the desperate chain of events her act of humanity will trigger.An orphaned teenage runaway who has fetched up with only her dog and her backpack in the lonesome town of her grandparents' birth, Jamie becomes housekeeper to Margaret, a retired photographer. There she meets Galen, a trapper who now lives at a remove from life. Slowly, they come to realise that each has something the other craves. But when the feral boy released by Jamie sets out on a lethal spree, their dreams come under terrifying threat...Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

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