The Appropriators

Synopsis

A blackly funny novel about plagiarism, ambition and the price of literary success.

Cara McQueen has just landed a two-book deal with one of London’s biggest imprints. At twenty-nine, she is the new firebrand of Belfast letters – or so the press would have it.

Then she meets Michael Madden: forty-one, charming, returning home to reinvent himself as a novelist. They sleep together. He reviews her debut, savagely, in The Guardian. Months later, his own debut is announced – with a premise unmistakably stolen from Cara’s laptop.

What follows is a blackly funny, propulsive novel about plagiarism, ambition and the small cruelties of the literary scene – and about how easily a writer’s revenge fantasy slides into something darker.