Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the 2015 Jerwood Prize In the middle of a winter'e(tm)s night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time ago , she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget. Without knowing if her friend, Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night 'e" a letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred and love. The thoughtfulness, intensity and sheer beauty of her writing in her first two novels, The Wilderness and All Is Song , brought Samantha Harvey both huge acclaim and many prize shortlistings. Those readers who loved those novels will fall on Dear Thief with relief and delight.