The Maiden: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024

Kate Foster

Buy this book from Bookshop.org to support The Reading Agency and local bookshops at no additional cost to you.

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024

‘A masterpiece’ – Janice Hallett, bestselling author of The Appeal

‘Exceptional — a tense, thrilling investigation, with a decidedly feminist slant’ – Daily Mail

Inspired by a real-life murder trial, Kate Foster’s The Maiden is a remarkable story with a feminist revisionist twist, giving a voice to women otherwise silenced by history. Winner of the Bloody Scotland Crime Debut of the Year 2023.

In the end, it did not matter what I said at my trial. No one believed me.

Edinburgh, October 1679. Lady Christian is arrested and charged with the murder of her lover, James Forrester. News of her imprisonment and subsequent trial is splashed across the broadsides, with headlines that leave little room for doubt: Adulteress. Whore. Murderess.

Only a year before, Lady Christian was newly married, leading a life of privilege and respectability. So, what led her to risk everything for an affair? And does that make her guilty of murder? She wasn’t the only woman in Forrester’s life, and certainly not the only one who might have had cause to wish him dead . . .

‘Riveting . . . the tension persists until the last page’ — The Times

*The Maiden was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction on 05/03/2024