‘In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It’s the story of a serial killer’s crimes and capture, yes, but it’s also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity.’ Stephen King

‘Quiet Dell has all the elements of a murder mystery, but its emotional scope is larger and more complex. It combines a strange hypnotic and poetic power with the sharp tones of documentary evidence. It offers a portrait of rural America in a time of crisis and dramatises the lives of a number of characters who are fascinating and memorable.’ Colm Tóibín

From one of America’s most celebrated novelists, the spectacularly riveting story, based on fact, of a 1931 multiple murder by a conman who preyed on widows – a story that has haunted Phillips since childhood.

Iconic writer: Jayne Anne Phillips emerged on the literary scene with a debut collection, Black Tickets, that galvanised critics and readers. She has since written four other novels that have won or been nominated for numerous prizes and grants, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, Guggenheim and Bunting fellowships, and two National Endowment of the Arts grants.

By far Phillips’s most accessible novel: Philiips’s two most recent novels, though glowingly reviewed and nominated for several awards, were difficult in territory and structurally. This novel is suspenseful and utterly fascinating – based on one of the first nationally sensationalised crimes in American history.

Fuelled by an author’s obsession: compelled by the story of Quiet Dell when her mother first told it to her when she was a teenager, Phillips later acquired a piece of the sound-proof panelling from the basement room where conman Harry Powers kept the Chicago mother and her three children (and at least one other widow) before murdering them all. This story has haunted her for over four decades, and she uses real newspaper articles and trial transcripts to help tell her story.

Off the book-page attention: we think of the Internet as the great facilitator of conmen and predators. But in the 1930s Harry Powers wrote eloquent, chivalrous letters to multiple widows whom he ‘met’ through matrimonial services, luring them to his home in rural West Virginia where he took their money and killed them. As Phillips says, ‘History gives us the facts, but literature tells us the story within them.’