It begins with a shocking act of violence. On a humid, thundery afternoon, Laura Blundy murders the man who saved her life. He is her husband, but she has a lover. Fifteen years her junior, already the father of five, Billy is a laborer-one of thousands of faceless men installing the sewers in the city. He is the only passion Laura has ever known, and so she pursues her obsessive dream of their life together to its dire extremes. In Laura Blundy, Julie Myerson has conjured a nineteenth-century London that is tender, murky, and unsettling. As Laura's story unravels in a dizzying, elliptical narrative, the reader falls helpless prey to the seduction of this bracingly original character. A tale of the unspeakable and tragic exigencies of loss and need, Laura Blundy is an eerily unforgettable love story. "Myerson knows precisely what she wants to do, and it makes your hair stand up on end."-Mail On Sunday (London)