Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Nov 2020
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Ana Kelly can deal with death. As an estate lawyer, an unfortunate part of her day-to-day is phone calls from the next of kin informing her that one of her clients has died.
But nothing could have prepared Ana for the call from Rebecca Taylor, explaining in a strangely calm tone that her husband Connor was killed in an accident.
Ana had been having an affair with Connor for three years, keeping their love secret in hotel rooms, weekends away, and swiftly deleted text messages. Though consuming, they hide their love well, and nobody knows of their relationship except Mark, Connor's best friend.
Alone and undone, Ana seeks friendship with the person who she once thought of as her adversary and opposite, but who is now the only one who shares her pain -- Rebecca. As Ana becomes closer to her lover's widow, she is forced to reconcile painful truths about the affair, and the fickleness of love and desire.
Funny, frank, and strange, Sarah Crossan's moving novel is wholly original and deeply resonant.
"[B]eautifully written...in stunning, spare lyrical prose, which appears like verse on the page as dialogue breaks into snippets of Ana's consciousness. Told from the point of view of a highly flawed Ana, this mesmerizing story will have readers hooked." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A fresh, affecting take on a tale as old as time." - Kirkus Reviews
"A gripping exploration of obsession, risk, and loss." - The Millions
"Gutsy, modern, deeply entertaining...unlike anything I've read before...The writing is so bright and alive and the novel is a triumph - crackling with psychological and sexual ambiguity." - The Observer (UK)
"Amazing...I absolutely love the form, which breathes new life into a familiar story making it both more elegant and more brutal." - Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing
"One of our most original writers." - John Boyne, author of A Ladder to the Sky
This information about Here Is the Beehive was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Crossan has lived in Dublin, London and New York, and now lives in Brighton. She graduated with a degree in philosophy and literature before training as an English and drama teacher at Cambridge University. Sarah has won many international awards for her verse novels, including the CILIP Carnegie Medal, the CBI Book of Year award and the CLiPPA Poetry Award. This is her first novel for adults.
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