The Black Country

Maddie and Harry: she's an estate agent, he's a teacher.

They'll say the live in the Black Country. They'll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they'd killed someone.

Thought they had.

And as they search for a truth, they'll tell us their secrets, their mistakes.

And we'll judge them. We'll judge Harry's fling with a schoolgirl and Maddie's previous life. We'll judge the nature of love and violence, good and evil.

The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it's darker than it should be.

The Black Country begs to be read in one go, tugging the reader onwards through its quietly intense and strangely intimate world. Reading it is a bit like being unable to look away from something disturbing, or like having a stranger whisper about it right into your ear.

Alison Moore.

Who's been telling lies? Everyone, it seems. Obliquely yet menacingly told, increasingly horrifice, and full of humour as dark as its title, Kerry Hadley-Pryce's clever novel undoes almost everything it looks at in the black country of relationships.

M. John Price