Creep: A Love Story by Emma van Straaten

From a blistering new voice in dark literary fiction, an unsettling portrait of loneliness, obsession, and identity which asks: if a stranger was left alone in your house, how well could they truly get to know you—enough to fall in love with you?

Alice and Tom are made for each other. Deeply connected, they share a flat in London, go to galleries together, enjoy the same books and wine. They even share a toothbrush. It’s all picture perfect.

Except Alice and Tom have never met.

Alice has been cleaning Tom’s apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness.

But as Alice prepares for the moment when she and Tom will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was. Instead, the line between fantasy and reality becomes ever more blurred, shattering everything Alice thought she knew.

Told in Alice’s compelling, deliciously acidic voice, Creep is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation, class, and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health, and the lost in society.

REVIEWS

"A thriller as much as it is an exploration of how we present ourselves and perceive our material culture, this is an evocative story that deserves immediate cult status." — Dazed

"It’s the relentlessness of Alice’s slipping grip on reality that hooks you, her feverish obsession reminiscent of Maud Ventura’s My Husband. If this doesn’t make you cancel your cleaner, nothing will." — The Times (UK)

"A thriller with a difference." — Cosmopolitan (UK)

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN:  978-0063411012
Pages: 256