I had no idea that she wrote fiction as well, but was pleasantly surprised with Magpie. I later discovered that the author was the same Elizabeth Day who wrote Failosophy – a book I really enjoyed. I chose this book because of the synopsis. When he asks her to move in with him and they start trying for a baby, she knows she has finally found the steadfast love and support she has been looking for all her life.īut their relationship is tested when they take in a lodger, Kate, who has little regard for personal boundaries and seems to take an uncomfortable interest in Jake – as well as the baby they are hoping to have. Marisa may have only known Jake a few months, but she has never felt this certain about anyone.
There is a yoga teacher who greets pregnant students with the words “Welcome, goddess”, a burnt-out boss who leaves PR to sell leggings with little gold ankle zips, and the unrelentingly awful Annabelle, who persists in calling her poor estranged daughter “Toad”.She has almost everything. Thank goodness that Magpie is funny, too. When Kate tells us that she is not worthy of being a mother, that she is damaged, faulty in some way that she cannot define, her words resonate with a disconcertingly familiar despair. A woman’s pregnancy bump appears to an infertile character as “a mountainous beacon of her indisputable womanhood”, while a rape is likened to having been pierced with shrapnel, “her entire self had to grow around it over the years that followed”.ĭay writes with hair-raising accuracy on the madnesses of fertility and pregnancy, infertility and miscarriage, love and longing. Magpie’s descriptions are often disturbingly memorable. Indeed, it could almost have been a book in itself: Jake’s domineering mother, Annabelle, comes to the fore as the reader is invited to consider what makes a woman a mother. The final third, by comparison, is less taut, although no less fascinating. Indeed, so compulsive is this book that there were times when, however quickly I read, it wasn’t fast enough. There is much talk on the book’s jacket about the twist, which is indeed electric, so much so that I had to go back and re-read the central section once my desire for plot had been sated. As her hormones pitch and surge, she sees Kate everywhere, not just at home, but skulking at the back of her yoga class, and in Jake’s arms.Įlizabeth Day is the author of four novels, including The Party, and her handling of narrative is pacy and assured. The opening of Magpie is decidedly creepy, as Marisa settles into the couple’s not-quite-right house, trying to make sense of both her past and a future filled with unknowns.
Sometimes, as Marisa tells us, “When you know, you just know.” Then a lodger moves in, too: Kate, with her dungarees, her PR job and her increasingly proprietorial manner towards the house, its contents… and Jake. Marisa and Jake have not long been a couple when they move in together and decide to start trying for a baby.
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