The Turnout

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

Megan Abbott is the perfect storyteller-compelling, confounding and unconventional - VAL MCDERMID

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

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

Megan Abbott is always a surprising writer, one with a liking for the raw and ambivalent side of life - Kate Atkinson

Megan Abbott is the 21st century's answer to Patricia Highsmith-she has that uncanny insight into the dark and treacherous depths of the human heart - Dan Chaon

An extraordinary writer - Nick Hornby

One of the greatest crime writers of our time - Mary Kubica