Sally Hepworth is a New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, with her novel The Family Next Door having recently been adapted for television.
Today I’ve got for you her new novel Mad Mabel.
Elsie just wants a quiet life. She’s been more than thirty years in her quiet little Melbourne lane and she’d happily stay thirty more if she thought she had that much time left.
Unfortunately for Elsie her elderly neighbour Ishaan has to go and die. Nothing suspicious of course and poor Elsie is the one to find the body.
Nothing suspicious, but it only takes one curious person, one probing question and a short search and Elsie’s past is there to discover. And try as she might Elsie can’t seem to escape Mad Mabel.
She’d always just accepted that the other children called her Mad Mabel, never asked why. She’d also accepted that friends were something the other children had, not her.
Mabel had her books. Her mother was distant, her father rich and important, but her aunt doted on her and for a gangly, red-headed girl in 1950’s Melbourne, that would have to be enough.
If only everyone could have left her alone. But when a series of strange and violent incidents occur around Mabel, it’s soon the whole community her Mad. Still Mabel yearns for quiet and privacy. She certainly was trying to become the youngest person ever in Australia to be convicted of murder!
Now, nearly seven decades later Elsie is telling the story of Mad Mabel. She wants to clear the air, but such notoriety doesn’t just disappear quietly.
Sally Hepworth is well loved for her character driven mysteries. In Elsie/Mad Mabel she has crafted a character who defies you to like her and yet despite her curmudgeonly exterior is destined to find a place in the hardest of hearts.
Mabel’s life exposes the impunity with which women and young girls were treated; in the 1950’s as now, and how that treatment, rather than receiving opprobrium often becomes a part of their larger ostracism. As a girl Mabel is sheltered from the truth of her family’s tragic history, but she is not shielded from the notoriety. Bereft of friends she has little resources to call on when her marginalisation leads to unwanted attentions.
As an adult, and believing she’d long since left her past behind, Mabel, now Elsie must figure out if she does have a community to rely on and what her role is within it.
The setup is simple. When a neighbour dies Elsie’s past come rushing in. Despite the clear innocuous nature of the elderly man’s demise people ask; but Mad Mabel was so close by.
We as readers are implicated in this speculation. Aren’t we here for the spectacle?
When a pair of online journalists come knocking on her door, how can we help but imagine Elsie as the latest in a long line of true-crime fodder.
Meanwhile the very human circumstances of Mabel’s life and the choices she made (and those taken from her) unfold in twinned narratives of the 1950’s and present day. The more we learn, the more we are challenged with the question of whether Elsie’s tough exterior is in fact a shield, and whether her proximity is an impending catastrophe or perhaps the best protection we could ask for.
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