The Hours Before Dawn

By Celia Fremlin

Book Overview

Edgar Award Winner for Best Novel

One of CrimeRead's 10 Best Reissued Mysteries of 2018

In this Edgar Award-winning thriller, a young housewife with two lively daughters and an endlessly crying baby battles domestic chaos as well as growing suspicions of the household's new lodger. Are Louise's fears the product of sleep deprivation, as her unsympathetic husband suggests, or is there really something sinister about the respectable-seeming schoolmistress?
During the hours before dawn, Louise suspects, people with a precarious grip on sanity are likeliest to slip over the edge into madness -- especially if there's someone ready to give them a push. Without spilling a drop of blood, this psychological thriller transforms everyday events and settings into the extraordinary, evoking an atmosphere of sheer terror. Crime novelist Andrew Taylor hailed author Celia Fremlin as "Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith ... her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating -- and quite horribly chilling."

"Fremlin is a major mistress of insight and suspense." -- The New York Times
"Highly intelligent entertainment, beautifully written with wit and humor." -- Frances Fyfield

"It grips like grim death." -- The Spectator

"A classic, lost in plain sight. The Hours Before Dawn is a book that should have a permanent spot within the spate of modern domestic suspense and psychological thriller titles that it inspired." -- Criminal Element

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0486816206
• ISBN13: 9780486816203
• Release Date: September 2017
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Gothic in suburbia

Celia Fremlin is one of the most underrated british mystery writers. She gave us near-twenty novels of a constant quality, sitting fear and nightmare in daily life, confrontating people next door to thrilling situations. "Hours", Edgar-winner for 1959, is one of her best works, often imitated (remember a Curtis Hanson movie, with Rebecca DeMornay...) but never equalled. Strenght of this book is the sharp observation of daily life of an housewife, her troubles with children, husband, insomnia... Powerfully written, plotted... A must.

My All-time Favorite Book

I read this book about once a year because it is so delicious. It's a great "read", quick and funny, and it's also a very, very smart commentary on domestic life in the early sixties in the USA. You will watch an ever more exhausted mother of small children encounter every day life as well as mysterious happenings from the gauzy gaze of exhaustion.