In My House - Tapa blanda

This stunningly accomplished first novel whips along like a thriller, and presents the reader with one more dilemma after another ... A must for the intelligent book group. (Kate Saunders, The Times)

The most original, well-observed and well-sustained first novel I've read in a long time. Alex Hourston has a really cool, unnerving way with words. It's crammed full of small, terrifyingly honest details which you feel ought to be in novels but rarely are. I loved it! (Julie Myerson)

Involving and original ... Hourston resolutely avoids the predictable, skilfully throwing the reader off-balance and creating a compelling sense of unease that shimmers unsettlingly beneath the ordinary lives she explores ... a strikingly promising debut. Caustically perceptive, wryly funny, occasionally devastatingly tender, Maggie Benson is a terrific protagonist; like all the most satisfactory characters in fiction, she is both infuriatingly contradictory and entirely plausible. (Guardian)

What would you do if you were in a toilet queue at Gatwick and someone mouthed the word, 'help'? So starts Hourston's intriguing debut novel before grabbing your hand and running headlong to its unsettling finale. (Stylist)

'Unsettling ... with a very persuasive thread of menace.' (Observer)

'An unsettling story about the friendship between a lonely older woman and an Albanian teenage girl she rescues from a trafficker at Gatwick airport. So accomplished, it's hard to believe this is Alex Hourston's first novel. (Good Housekeeping)

With unflinching coolness and a voice vice-grip strong, you have no choice but to listen to Maggie as she tells her story. (Sainsbury's Magazine)

A slow burner that delivers in a most satisfying way. (Fanny Blake, Woman & Home)

Full of the most dazzling observations which, as a writer, I wish that I'd had myself. (Allison Pearson)

An unsettling but powerful story about family breakdown and urban loneliness. (Sunday Mirror)

After fifteen years writing strategy for advertising agencies, Alex Hourston took a break to go back to university and her first love, books. She completed a Masters in English and started a PhD, but put it aside when the idea for this novel surfaced. Alex lives outside Brighton with her family. She is working on her second novel, an exploration of infidelity and emotional inheritance.