Paperback. Black cover with cream and green title.

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A FROST PAPERBACK is a loved book which a member of the Frost family has checked for condition, cleanliness, completeness and readability. When the buyer collects their book, the delivery charge of £3.00 is not made

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2016. From the author of Apple Tree Yard comes a masterful thriller about espionage, love, and redemption.

John Harper is hiding in a remote hut on a tropical island. As he lies awake at night, listening to the rain on the roof, he believes his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of what he’s already done. In a nearby town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic history. They begin an affair, but can they offer each other redemption? Or do the ghosts of the past always catch up with us in the end? Flashing back from late 1990s Indonesia to Cold War Europe, Harper’s childhood in civil rights-era California, and Indonesia during the massacres of 1965 and the subsequent military dictatorship, Black Water explores some of the darkest events of recent history through the story of one troubled man. In this gripping follow-up to Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty writes with the intelligence, vivid characterization, and moral ambiguity that make her fiction resonate in the reader’s mind long after the final page.

Review: This is the best book I’ve read this year. As so often with Louise Doughty, she builds a compelling, murky arena in which well crafted characters struggle with both chance and choice (specifically here how personal decisions, often taken in extremis, deform both the individual and wider society). With the exception of Oppenheimer’s recent films, the Indonesian Massacres of 1965-66 seem little discussed in Western media, but Doughty uses their causes and consequences to drag a slow claw down the spine of the reader, creating a confusion of sympathies and judgements that linger beyond the final page. Any author can use human barbarism and the fragility of order to quicken the pulse; Doughty’s skill lies in embedding scattered moments of genuine terror in an engaging, character-driven narrative in which the reader sees reflecting shards of their own life and decisions. She has that rare gift of making the reader uncomfortable with what they are reading yet uncomfortably aware of the armchair from which that are passing judgement. At first glance, the historical setting and style of ‘Black Water’ makes it seem very different to Doughty’s bestseller, ‘Apple Tree Yard’ (indeed, she is to be commended for not just taking the easy route of merely recasting that previous book here). However, her core approach seems essentially similar (and similarly compelling): dropping us into dreadful moments and whispering ‘Let he who is without sin . . .’ Gripping stuff.

LOUISE DOUGHTY is the author of several novels, including Apple Tree Yard, which was a top ten bestseller in the U.K. and Ireland and was translated into twenty-seven languages. It was long-listed for The Guardian’s Not the Booker prize and short-listed for a CWA Steel Dagger Award and a Specsavers National Book Award. Her sixth novel, Whatever You Love, was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award. She lives in London.