The Wych Elm

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What to expect

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Wych Elm by Tara Elm, read by Paul Nugent.

For me it all goes back to that night, the dark corroded hinge between before and after, the slipped-in sheet of trick glass that tints everything on one side in its own murky colours and leaves everything on the other luminous and untouchable.


One night changes everything for Toby. A brutal attack leaves him traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks refuge at his uncle's rambling home, the Ivy House, filled with cherished memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins.

But not long after Toby's arrival, a discovery is made. A skull, tucked neatly inside the old wych elm in the garden.

As detectives begin to close in, Toby is forced to examine everything he thought he knew about his family, his past, and himself.

A spellbinding standalone from a literary writer who turns the crime genre inside out, The Wych Elm asks what we become, and what we're capable of, if we no longer know who we are.

Critics Review

A truly great writer
Gillian Flynn
The Wych Elm is her best novel yet
Erin Kelly
Lyrical, suspenseful, unpredictable
My favourite novel of last year
Sophie Hannah
Terrific - terrifying, amazing, and the prose is incandescent
Stephen King
A masterpiece
John Boyne
The finest crime writer around right now
Mail on Sunday
One of the most compulsive psychological mysteries since Donna Tartt's The Secret History...impossible to put down
The Times
The Wych Elm should cement French's place in the first rank of great literary novelists
Observer
Her storytelling skills are incredible
Red

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