The Turnout

Critics Review

• Compulsively readable

  Ruth Ware (2021)

• Impossible to put down, creepy and claustrophobic. It’s WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE in ballet shoes

  Stephen King

• Imagine Black Swan by way of Virginia Andrews’ cult Flowers in the Attic and you have some idea of the dark nature of The Turnout … A twisting, turning story of revenge and redemption

  Stylist

• Raw, real and compulsively readable. In The Turnout, Megan Abbott does what she does best – combining family tensions with simmering desire and burning professional ambition

  Ruth Ware (2021)

• Dark and juicy and tinged with horror

  New York Times

• Charged with foreboding, the novel throbs with gothic tension

  Irish Times

• Abbott’s prose is dazzlingly precise and her portrayal of student rivalries razor-sharp in this taut novel

  Observer

• Abbott captures the blood, sweat, tears and rivalries behind the apparently effortless grace, to create a contorted and febrile world where pain is “our friend, our lover” and the feeling of menace grows stronger with every page

  Guardian

• The Turnout centres on a ballet school … a hothouse ridden with suppressed hysteria, delineated so convincingly in Abbott’s peerless prose that violent death, when it comes, seems not just plausible but inevitable. My thriller of the year

  Daily Telegraph, Best Books of the Year

• A story so intensely told that it will haunt your dreams

  Daily Express, Best Books of 2021

• Megan Abbott is one of the finest writers working in any genre, anywhere and THE TURNOUT might well be her masterpiece. Nobody else writes so well about the darkness and damage lurking just beneath an elegant and serene surface. Brilliant and breath-taking, this is a book that you will not be able to forget

  Mark Billingham (2021)

• Abbott creates a dark and mesmerising world and, as always, is so brilliant at portraying women and girls and their competition and complexities … It makes Black Swan look like a children’s story

  Harriet Tyce, bestselling author of Blood Orange

• There’s no one who captures the atmosphere of a tight-knit hothouse world, in all its feverish beauty and brutality, quite like Megan Abbott

  Tana French (2021)

• Intoxicatingly intense, with a frisson of suspense and lurking disquiet throughout, those feelings will linger with you long past the last page

  Heat Magazine

• This dark thriller will suck you in right to the final page

  Sun

• All one needs to know about a Megan Abbott book is that it’s a Megan Abbott book — dreamy, sexy, a deep dive into a subculture that has been exhaustively researched. The Turnout is all those things and more, taking you so far into the world of a small ballet school that you feel the characters’ aches and pains in your joints, your feet and, most dangerous of all, your heart

  LAURA LIPPMAN

• There is not a writer alive who is better at investigating the tension and threat of violence at the centre of women’s lives than Megan Abbott–because no one else is looking at the violence from within women’s lives, as opposed to outside threats on trains, planes, in windows, or on dark, shadowy streets. Megan goes into the heart of female spaces and finds the ugly in all that pretty, the dark in all that light, with breath-taking suspense. The Turnout has notes of James M. Cain and Alfred Hitchcock, but it’s better because it’s so fresh and unexpected, so wholly revelatory. I turned page after page, holding my breath in fear, and also excitement, about what might happen in this run-down ballet school, what blood red might be lurking behind all that pink. This is Megan Abbott working at the absolute height of her talent

  ATTICA LOCKE

• Another great read from best-selling author Megan Abbott

  Hello Magazine

• Abbott has a top-notch ability to reveal the dark undercurrents of women’s relationships and sexuality. Her taut, unsettling writing creates tension through the slightest actions and phrases, and keeps the pages turning. This is clever, chilling psychological suspense at its best.

  Library Journal (starred review)

• This is an extraordinary psychological thriller, that brilliantly delivers its narrative and atmosphere through the taut, damaged bodies of its dancer protagonists. The writing is so pungent, physical and sensuous you feel like you’re right there in the room with these obsessive, damaged, seductive characters. It’s like Dario Argento’s Suspiria performing a pas de deux with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

  Keith Stuart, bestselling author of The Boy Made of Blocks (2021)

• This look at the darker side of the dance world demonstrates why Abbott has few peers at crafting moving stories of secrets and broken lives

  Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• Megan Abbott writes at the darkest and sharpest cutting edge of psychological fiction. The Turnout is a completely standout novel of perception, mystery and style. It grips, challenges and delivers one of the finest and most disturbing stories you’ll read in a very long while. It’s also achingly moving. I loved it

  Henry Sutton (2021)

• This is simply a masterclass in great storytelling and writing, an edgy and unpredictable tale full of nuance about the violence we inflict on others and ourselves

  Big Issue