Monster Love

Brendan and Sherilyn. A young couple in love. Each has met their soul mate, and nothing can come between them.

In fact, the Gutteridges are so wrapped up in each other that their neighbours barely know them, despite the woman next door’s nosy curiosity. Their families and their work colleagues see only the perfect couple on the perfect home, the perfect car crouching in the drive.

And then a baby is born – contaminating the pristine life in which there is only room for two, But they find the ideal solution.

What may be one couple’s happy ending is everyone else’s indescribable nightmare… Told by the Gutteridges, their families, neighbours and others who come across them in the aftermath, this perverse love story hurtles to the heart of evil – the kind of evil that could be next door to any of us.

Carol Topolski

is a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her many previous roles include music festival organizer, advertising executive, nursery school director, director of a rape crisis centre and refuge for battered women, probation officer and film censor. She lives in London and is married with two daughters. Monster Love is her first novel.

Carol Topolski's q & a

What sparked Monster Love?
In the throes of writing another novel (now lurking at the back of a drawer), I found myself writing a couple of pages in the voice of a small child in a cage. I wanted to know who put her there and what could have driven them to it. Peversely, her voice has now vanished from the novel - but then the story is, in part, about how appalling things can be either wilfully ignored or accidentally missed.

Where and when is the novel set?
The central couple come from the east and west of England. They meet in London and fetch up in a sedate Manchester suburb in the 80's. They are Thatcher's children: acquisitive, aspirational and materialistic, so chime perfectly with the values of the time.

Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
Sharon, the juror at the couple's trial, is bolshy, funny aimless and irreverent. Barely out of her teens, she finds herself faced with the mighty responsibility of deciding on two people's guilt or innocence and rise to the occasion. I'm very fond of her - probably because she represents my inner (and unexpressed) delinquent!

What's your favourite children's book and why?
I spent most of my childhood in my local library and devoured shelf loads if Andrew Lang's fairy stories, followed by wildly inapproapriate adult books. But along with my children came Roald Dahl and I marvelled at his understanding that children love the revolting, the squishy, the rude, the badly behaved and sometimes have fantasies of blowing up their grannies. Brilliant.