"Magnificently sad and funny...the best skewering of life between the sexes since Mary McCarthy’s The Group ."— Boston Globe ('Best Books of 2015') "Watchful, witty, unillusioned, exultant…There is a note of elegy in all of Harrower’s work, even as the adrenaline flows, and a lyricism reminiscent of F.Scott Fitzgerald at his desperate best."— Times Literary Supplement "Like a treasure from an unearthed time capsule."— The Wall Street Journal "I can't recommend this brilliant, austere writer strongly enough . . . Harrower is funny and elegant and devastating."—James Wood,  The New Yorker "Subtle yet wounding, and very much alive."— The Guardian "Harrower evokes the waste and futility of a decadent class with all the bite and poignancy of F. Scott Fitzgerald."—Eimear McBride, New Statesman "Harrower can pierce your heart."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Zoe Howard is seventeen when her brother, Russell, introduces her to Stephen Quayle. Aloof and harsh, Stephen is unlike anyone she has ever met. His sister, Anna, is shy and thoughtful. Zoe and Russell, Stephen and Anna: they come from different social worlds but the four of them will spend their lives moving in and out of each other's shadow. Set amid the lush gardens and grand stone houses of Sydney Harbour, In Certain Circles is an intense psychological drama about family and love, tyranny and freedom. Elizabeth Harrower published only four novels in her short but brilliant career. This fifth novel was completed in 1971, but withdrawn from publication at the last minute. The manuscript languished in the National Library of Australia archives for forty years before Michael Heyward of Text Publishing was allowed to read it. He knew immediately that it must be published. In Certain Circles has been lauded internationally, and its publication coincides with a massive resurgence of interest in Harrower's work. ‘Magnificently sad and funny...the best skewering of life between the sexes since Mary McCarthy’s “The Group.’—Boston Globe ('Best Books of 2015') ‘Harrower’s prose is watchful, witty, unillusioned, exultant. Its healthful vitality – vivid, accurate, alive to irony – is a dashing stand against its subject matter: human perversity, so often squalid, senseless, swallowing all meaning. The reader marvels at its balance, its sinuousness, as each fresh wave hits….There is a note of elegy in all of Harrower’s work, even as the adrenaline flows, and a lyricism reminiscent of F.Scott Fitzgerald at his desperate best.’—Times Literary Supplement ‘In Certain Circles is subtle yet wounding, and very much alive.’—Guardian ‘Harrower can pierce your heart.’—Michael Dirda, Washington Post ‘With its flavor of Henry James, Harrower’s rediscovered story is an odd, brittle yet impressive piece of work that exposes the complex passions beneath a drawing-room-scenario surface.’—Kirkus Reviews ‘A stark, uncompromising drama of marital imprisonment and psychological manipulation. In its atmosphere of dread and compulsion it has elements of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic suspense novels. But Ms. Harrower’s fearsome objectivity and her bristling, beautiful prose come from modernist masters like Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen.’ Wall St Journal ‘Harrower was right about In Certain Circles being well written, but surely wrong to take its superb style for granted, as if mere literary muscle memory. Like the rest of her work, the novel is severely achieved: the coolly exact prose cannot be distinguished from the ashen exhaustion of its tragic fires…The book belongs with her best work, with The Watch Tower and The Long Prospect…[It] is more explicit than Harrower’s earlier work about ideological tensions between men and women. It is also broader in scope and not as angry—wiser and less hopeless.’ James Wood, New Yorker ‘Harrower evokes the waste and futility of a decadent class with all the bite and poignancy of F Scott Fitzgerald.’ Eimear McBride, New Statesman ‘In Certain Circles [is] a pin-sharp psychological drama about two pairs of siblings, set on the shores of Sydney Harbour. Harrower’s searing, spare prose is breathtaking, as is her depiction of dashed promise and the gulf between the sexes.’ Di Speirs, BBC Radio Books Editor ‘For me, the great discovery of 2014 was the work of Elizabeth Harrower.’ Favourite Books of 2014, New Yorker ‘Elizabeth Harrower’s unpublished In Certain Circles finally gets its moment in the sun, and it’s been well worth the wait.’ Australian Financial Review ‘A coup…weirdly thrilling line by line…[its] dense and adult conversation crackles with a sense of moral urgency.’ Australian ‘Her insights into the nature of love, the role of women and the torsions of power in even the most ordinary relationship are bitter and sometimes cruel, wielded in the way that acute honesty may be, like a whip. Yet they are always delivered via the honeyed dipper of her prose.’ The Monthly ‘A novel of astonishing psychological insig