The Parry and the Lunge

Five women are joined by more than the bonds of friendship. However, they have no idea that the secrets they individually harbour create a darkness that will draw them closer together with deadly consequences. There is some hope that the arrival of a mysterious policeman named Kolko will help them see the connections before it's too late. The problem is that everyone keeps forgetting their past - either in little pieces or in whole chunks.

There are hundreds of questions for the women to answer. Is Stephen really back from the dead? Did he die alone and unnoticed in his tenement flat, carving his final words "Please feed me" into the table? Is one of them trying to kill with poisoned pizza? And what happened to the girls in Egypt, or to Dorothy up the side of the mountain that resembled a face?

Here in The Parry and the Lunge, once again, the master of time-fiction, David Mathew (O My Days, Sick Dice, Ventriloquists) burrows deep into the hidden stories of his characters, where nothing is what it seems, and everyone has something to hide.

"In The Parry and the Lunge, Mathew stirs together idioms and genres into a riotous and pungent stew. What comes over at first as provincial social satire, with the wonted illicit sex and buried violence, opens, like a flower or a wound, becoming strange - a maw gapes under its finely depicted south-Bedfordshire setting and gulps everything down."

Timothy J. Jarvis, AUTHOR OF THE WANDERER

"This is a big book in every way; it has muscles; you can feel it flex as the story unfolds. Mathew is ambitious and daring, even the title bobs and weaves. The language is, as ever, fulminous."

PAUL MELOY, AUTHOR OF ADORNMENTS OF THE STORM