The Followers

Rebecca Wait

21 April 2016
9781447224754
256 pages

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of I'm Sorry You Feel That Way, Rebecca Wait's The Followers is a tense and shocking novel about family ties and how much we can outrun our past.

'A great surging shout of a novel' – Guardian
'Profoundly unsettling, brilliantly executed' - Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven


Judith has been visiting her mother, Stephanie, in prison once a month for the last eight years. But neither of them can bring themselves to talk about what brought them here - or about Nathaniel.

When Stephanie first meets him, she is a struggling single mother and Nathaniel is a charismatic outsider, unlike anyone she's ever known. When she decides to join the small religious cult he has founded high on the moors, Stephanie thinks she is doing the best for her daughter: a new home, a new life, a new purpose. As Stephanie slowly surrenders herself to Nathaniel's will, tensions deepen, faith and doubt collide, and a horrifying act of violence changes everything.

'A page-turning finish' – Daily Mail
'Such a suspenseful and compassionate book . . . I thought it remarkable.' – Sunjeev Sahota, author of Ours Are The Streets

Wait's propulsive plotting and the complicity she creates through the power of her writing form a great surging shout of a novel
Wait's confident plotting leads the reader towards a climax as satisfying as it is inevitable . . . The tenderness and the transformative nature of the ending . . . are truly moving.
A restrained tour-de-force, a profoundly unsettling, brilliantly executed, and deeply humane depiction of a slow slide toward an unspeakable act, and the difficulty and necessity of finding a way to live in the aftermath. The Followers is a remarkable novel.