Hero and the Girl Next Door

The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the 'memorability test' with flying colors. What seems simple or simply achieved more often than not on closer inspection yields subtleties of feeling and form. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than 'social verse'. An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.

About the Author

As well as writing psychological thrillers, Sophie Hannah is a bestselling poet and an award-winning short story writer. Her fifth collection of poetry, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award and she won first prize in the Daphne du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for The Octopus Nest. The Other Half Lives was shortlisted for the Independent Booksellers' Book of the Year Award and a Barry Award and her psychological thriller The Carrier won the 2013 Specsavers National Book Award for Crime Novel of the Year.

The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives were adapted for television as Case Sensitive, starring Olivia Williams and Darren Boyd. Sophie has been commissioned by the estate of Agatha Christie to write the first Hercule Poirot novel since Christie's death, for publication in September 2014.