The Touch - Hardcover

All her life, the lovely Donna has suffered from debilitating bodily pain for which doctors have been unable to assign a cause. Her long-term, emotionally remote live-in lover Will and her sister Gayle, a nurse, become intrigued by the claims made by a man they have found mugged in the street. As Frank Chapman recovers in the hospital where Gayle works, he begins to make his way inside Gayle's, Donna's and Will's lives. The let him in, touched by his seeming helplessness, and by their own power to help him. Charismatic and unstable, Frank believes he can change events and heal Donna. New loves, new possibilities unfold in the tender warmth of an unusually calm summer, as what the four of them have most envied and desired in each other's lives is suddenly within their grasp. Frank's touch, his haphazard intervention, whether benevolent or malign, overturns all they thought were fixed and secure.

As she proved in her haunting debut Sleepwalking, Julie Myerson knows how to spin a gripping tale that takes place where suffering and pain shatter the mirror of commonplace reality and a trace of the supernatural gleams through the shards. Trenchant, perceptive, coolly compassionate, this is another confident step in the career of a rising young talent.

Julie Myerson was born in Nottingham in 1960. She is the author of Sleepwalking (1993), Me and the Fat Man (1998), Laura Blundy (2000), Something Might Happen (2003) The Story of You (2006) and Out of Breath (2008). She lives in London.