'Bloody brilliant' Paula Hawkins, bestselling author of The Girl on the Train

Some memories are too powerful to live only in the past.

During a ferocious storm, a red-haired stranger appears in the garden of a small farming cottage. Eliza and her parents take him in. But very soon, it’s clear he has no intention of leaving.

A century later, Mary and Graham have experienced every parent’s worst nightmare. Now, escaping the memories and the headlines, they have found an idyllic new home in rural Suffolk. A cottage, a beautiful garden. The perfect place to forget. To move on. But life doesn’t always work that way.
A devastating depiction of profound loss, sexual longing, love and true evil, The Stopped Heart is the finest novel to date from this most fearless and original of writers.

Prizes

Short-listed for The New Angle Prize 2017 (UK)

This is a book that you will turn through the night to reach its conclusion — Myerson has you dying for the end and even surer that you will do just that when you get there. Spoiler alert: don’t expect roses around the door. * The Times *
It’s the sort of book you cannot put down, partly because it is so addictive and partly because if you do put it down, you know you will spend the next few hours startling at every creaking door… It really is unremittingly, heart-stoppingly dark. -- Viv Groskop * Observer *
The German word unheimlich captures best what Myerson writes about so well: that eerie sense when something is both familiar and unfamiliar. The English word for that is 'uncanny'. -- Katherine Weber * New York Times *
Filled with darkness… An unsettling and disturbing tale. -- Beth Jones * Sunday Telegraph *
There’s a rhythm to these purposeful leaps between past and present that becomes part of the experience of reading this increasingly gripping novel.... The German word unheimlich captures best what Myerson writes about so well: that eerie sense when something is both familiar and unfamiliar * New York Times *
Myerson evokes mystery and madness, with glimpses into devastating events, the full extent of which are slowly and skilfully uncovered. -- Hannah Nathanson * Vogue *
I raced through this compelling story of parental heartbreak interspersed with the unravelling a century-old crime. -- Cathy Rentenbrink * Bookseller *
The story is heart wrenching, unremittingly grisly… A thriller and…a page-turner… The Stopped Heart exposes the flesh of the lives cut in half, the pain and loves of the past, and why they are no less real than the present. -- Heloise Wood * Independent on Sunday *
Darkness courses through Myerson’s psychological horror novel. -- Francesca Angelini * Sunday Times *
A brilliantly unsettling read. Myerson’s elegant prose creates a suffocating feeling of dread as the psychological consequences of loss and violence are mercilessly revealed. -- Eithne Farry * Mail on Sunday *

Julie Myerson is the author of Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House and nine novels, including the best-selling Something Might Happen, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In the words of the Observer, she 'has a talent for making the unthinkable readable. The results are riveting.'