Lane ratchets up the apprehension with a maestro's skill we first saw in her debut, Alys Always.. Read it: everyone else will be.

The exquisitely sinister psychological thriller that is going to take us all by storm this summer, Harriet Lane's Her, has a Notes on a Scandal-type relationship between an exhausted young mother and her rich sophisticated neighbour.

Harriet Lane's Alys Always was one of the most memorable fictional debuts of recent years, a seemingly simple story that discovered subtle ways to unsettle, and which found elegant, disturbing insights into familiar English obsessions with class and status. Lane's new book, Her, due in June, promises to be this year's unmissable summer novel. Among Lane's antecedents is the pin-sharp prose of Patricia Highsmith

Deliciously nasty, Her belongs to an emerging "women beware women" sub-genre indebted to Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Yet it is distinctive in its domesticity and its missing formulaic elements: a violence-free psychological thriller in which the victim doesn't even know there is a threat

Icicle-sharp... This is psychological bait-and-switchery to put on the shelf alongside Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon

As seductive as it is chilling, Her is quality literary fiction meets psychological thriller, the devil of which is in the detail