Scotland, 1995. On the hills of Cornton Vale Prison.

She was convicted of killing her best friend . . .

Laura Brannigan has been put away for murder. She insists that she didn't kill Jackie. But her search for true justice seems futile. Then she receives a letter that takes her back to her youth and the memory of an old love, Stuart . . .

With characters it is impossible not to care about, this is storytelling at its very best

An emotional and moving epic you won't forget in a hurry

Praise for Lesley Pearse

Heart-warming and evocative, a real delight to read

Evocative, compelling, told from the heart

Utterly riveting, brilliant

Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption… An Aubynesque simile can brighten a grey passage… Most of the novel is harsh; all of it is entertaining

St Aubyn is excellent on the characters’ psychology... powerful and moving

Malevolently enjoyable… The scenes that feel most real, interestingly, are those that are most fantastical, when we are drawn inside the chaos of Dunbar’s unravelling mind… Here the language feels sculpted and precise, Dunbar’s obsessive solipsism both violent and convincing… St Aubyn’s talent for brittle one-liners is as lethal as ever

In Mother’s Milk – the fourth Melrose novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker – St Aubyn gave a terrifyingly believable description of senility, and he applies the same skill here as his hero’s sense of time and his own sanity fall away with a tragic semi-awareness… He is at his funniest when describing characters at their worst. He narrates their terrible inner thoughts with a bleakly comic ironic detachment

As Dunbar wanders half-hallucinating in the Cumbrian wilderness, the only dialogue is between the mind and itself. A heartbreaking scrim of the broken and unspoken, image upon image flames up... Here, we can feel the writer feeling, and with Lawrentian clarity: a distillation of harrowed human pity

Lively… Beautifully written and caperish in tone, St Aubyn’s Dunbar plays the Bard’s story for savage laughs

Perhaps Edward St Aubyn’s most impressive achievement in this retelling…is to find a way of structuring the story so that it rattles along at a breathless pace from start to finish. Somehow, even though we know what’s going to happen…Dunbar is still a page turner… Even if you ignore all the intricate metatextual game-playing, this is still a magnificent book: a cautionary tale about what happens when people value power and money more than family and basic human decency, imaginatively re-tooled for our hyper-materialistic age

St Aubyn’s Dunbar is a salvific story of familial breakdown animated by decadently wicked rich people on the one hand and the fragile optimism generated by expensive psychotherapy on the other… St Aubyn, the laureate of upper-class depravity and brittle recuperation, is the perfect author for a waspish, satirical take on King Lear’s family melodrama… Dunbar does not take up the challenge of redrawing the play’s gender politics. St Aubyn produces a deftly understated Dover Cliff sequence and avoids the hyperbole of Gloucester’s blinding, domesticating the play’s sublime into an insidiously sardonic depiction of depraved twenty-first-century glamour

Hugely satisfying. Sensitive and sorrowful, it is also fast paced, sassy, and very funny… Another fruitful pursuit from the worthwhile Hogarth enterprise

The tale is the perfect vehicle for what this author does best, which is to expose repellent, privileged people and their hollow dynasties in stellar prose.

St. Aubyn’s resplendent rendering of nature’s grand drama and Dunbar’s shattered psyche, Florence’s love, and her sisters’ malevolence make for a stylish, embroiling, and acid tragedy.

Brilliant and heartwrenching

Hugely satisfying. Sensitive and sorrowful, it is also fast paced, sassy, and very funny... Another fruitful pursuit from the worthwhile Hogarth enterprise.

A psychologically acute look at power, dispossession and the ravages of old age... Caustically funny and full of fury, this is a devastating look at a family meltdown

Darkly comic… The intertextual prompts are nimble, and Dunbar’s painful wanderings through the snow re-enact something of the heath… An ambitious “take” on Shakespeare’s greatest play

This study of a modern, materialistic society and blood relationships, at once witty and devastating, is the perfect reading over any family Christmas.

Gentle, soft-spoken, and full of wisdom

A delight to read

Prepare to have your heartstrings tugged by this quirky tale

A sprightly, digressive, intriguing fandango on life and time

These individuals converge to confront each other in the big shabby house, like characters in a Chekhov play. At first, hellish implosion looms. Slowly, erratically, connection creeps in. Lux quietly mediates. Ire softens. Sophia at last eats something. Art resees Nature..."Winter" gives the patient reader a colorful, witty - yes, warming - divertissement

With Iris and Lux as catalysts, scenes from Christmas past unfold, and our narrow views of Sophia and Art widen and deepen, filled with the secrets and substance of their histories, even as the characters themselves seem to expand. As in Sophia's case, for Art this enlargement is announced by a hallucination - "not a real thing," as Lux tells Iris, whose response speaks for the book's own expansive spirit: "Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing?"