Jake wants a family, and so does Marisa – acutely so, as her own mother left with Marisa’s baby sister when she was seven. A children’s illustrator, she even has room there to have her own studio. Within three months, Marisa has left her small rented north London flat and moved into Jake’s spacious place in Battersea. This romantic cliche has a double-edged meaning, and warning signs flash as the twists and turns of Day’s plot unfold. At their first physical meeting, “she felt a crackle of energy, a fusion of some sort, as if two molecules had collided and meshed and sparked a new thing”. Marisa has found the man of her dreams online: Jake. I nfertility, surrogacy, sexual assault, mental illness and a lot of desirable housing stock might seem too much for one book, but with her new novel, Magpie, Elizabeth Day pulls off a polished and creepy thriller which probes at the heart of what it means to be able to conceive a child – or not.
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