And then, when Marisa’s mother had left, baby clamped to her, the house in the countryside had fallen silent. The shrill caterwaul of her newborn sister’s crying. The raised voices of her parents’ arguing. The slamming of an oven door, the jangle of an overloaded dishwasher shelf. The discordant hesitations as her father attempted to play the piano. In her memories, it was always the sound she remembered first. Marisa’s own childhood had been studded through with noise. It was this that ultimately persuaded her. ‘Yes, it’s got a lovely sense of calm to it.’
When she commented on this, the woman who was show- ing her around nodded. She noticed the quiet, which was rare for London, especially when you were this close to a main road. Marisa stood on this terrace, her sandals shadowed on biscuit-coloured patio stones, and she looked down to the garden below, which had a strip of lawn lined with potted plants, the soil newly turned. Someone had made the odd decision to put a bathroom on the second floor with doors that led out onto a roof terrace. The plantation shutters were plastic and layered with thin spores of dust. The floor- ing, which had clearly been bought in bulk by the developer, was a shade too light, the wood-laminate a touch too smooth to pass for real. Well, not perfect exactly, because houses never are, but at least the imperfections were liveable with.
Ahead of her upcoming appearance at Hay Festival Winter Weekend, we’re offering an exclusive extract of the novel: here is chapter one. Elizabeth Day’s latest novel Magpie is an exhilarating psychological thriller that hinges on the tension between two women engulfed in motherhood, greed, and obsession.
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