Mirrorland: the dark and twisty fiction debut from 2022's new voice in psychological suspense

Product Information

A dread that I don't want to examine any more than anything else that's gone through my mind since all those voice mail messages began filling up my inbox. A dark and twisty thriller told with thumping heart and extraordinary tenderness— Mirrorland is as much a celebration of imagination and its escapism as an examination of trauma and its echoes. I used to read and review a lot of thrillers but, if I’m honest, it’s been a while since a ‘thriller’ really thrilled me in any way. In the stern stood Annie, Mouse, Belle, and Old Joe Johnson, the barkeep of the Three-Fingered-Joe Saloon. That this is the only thing about America that I won’t miss makes me feel more tired, more pissed off.

In the prologue, we meet twin sisters Cat and El, who’ve run to the harbor at night to join a pirate ship. Books don’t always have to reinvent the wheel, but if you’re going to lean into familiar themes and ideas, I want a seamless execution. Mirrorland was a taught, twisty thriller which kept me guessing and had more layers than appear on the surface.Mirrorland is part horror part psychological thriller and I spent every minute I could gripped to the pages, desperate to know what exactly was really happening. Between them, the gray firth and the low rolling hills of Kinghorn and Burntisland on the opposite shore.

It can feel a little confusing at parts, but stick with it and everything will come together in ways you didn’t expect. Novelists like Emma Tennant and John Herdman were working that vein decades ago, and let’s not talk about Stevenson, Hogg and Scott.

She is such a complex character but I agree, she never gives up on herself so it’s easy to be in her corner. The main reason I suggest this is because the book moves back and forth between the present and the past, something that is very difficult to tell when you’re listening to the narration. Cat and El are Mirror twins, the rarest of the rare, at least that’s what their mother told them growing up. I was compelled by Cat’s struggle to mine the fragments of her memories, and by the contrasting landscape of Cat and El’s make-believe world with the gradually revealed realities of their childhood.

We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child.Mirrorlands is a journey through space and time to the meeting points of Russia and China, the world’s largest and most populous countries.