January Fiction

This month’s pick is a thriller that has set both the publishing and film industries talking

- James Walton

The Maid

by Nita Prose HarperCollins, £14.99

Molly Gray, the narrator of Nita Prose’s startlingly good debut novel, is a young woman who knows her place—and who rather likes it. For “approximately four years, 13 weeks, and five days” she’s been working as a maid in the five-star Regency Grand hotel where she takes both pride and genuine pleasure in returning the guests’ rooms “to a state of perfection”.

As that very precise approximation indicates, Molly is on the autistic spectrum, not easily able to read social situations or understand metaphors. She does, minds you, know a dead body when she sees it—which she does one morning in Suite 410. A business magnate by trade, the recently-deceased Mr. Black was a regular guest, but not a well-liked one, given his hostility to more or less everybody. And that certainly included the trophy wife with whom he was often pictured in the society pages, where he was usually described as “a silver fox” (“though, to be clear,” Molly characteristically adds, “he is neither silver nor a fox”).