A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Caroline Blackwood's blackly brilliant debut - now published as a Virago Modern Classic

All I long for is to be given a little privacy, so that I can try to clarify all my raging thoughts and feelings about my present situation . . .

J is a lonely woman without the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, leaving J in their lavish Upper West Side apartment with not only their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but the sulky, cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage.

Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who 'invites a kind of cruelty'. This is an invitation J fully intends to take up - and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood's first novel is a testament to her razor-sharp mastery - and mockery - of the darkest depths of human feeling.

'Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith. Her writing is smart, economical and as dark as night' ARAMINTA HALL

'The perfect book for people who find Joan Didion too even-keeled, Renata Adler too fair-minded . . . In its own way, it's a perfect novel' LA REVIEW OF BOOKS

'A writer of rare distinction, the author of wit-drenched books about the wages of class, women's inhumanity to women, bitchiness, greed, abjection, family, monsters' NEW YORKER

'Witty, observant, clever' Guardian