‘This, her sixth novel, is a gripping investigation of love, loss and revenge … Doughty’s precise, spare style and skilled plotting is perfectly suited to the exploration of a practical and pragmatic woman plunged into terrible grief.  The plot moves faultlessly between past and present as we read about what has gone before … The story is unsentimental, unsparing and entirely compelling.  Beautifully constructed and rawly emotional, this is a starkly brilliant and moving investigation of the depths of human despair.’
Financial Times

‘In prose that is devastatingly efficient and as stark as winter branches, Louise Doughty scrutinises the riven state of the bereaved, a life of both dulled, unthinking existence and unbearable lucidity … Novels about love and loss are ten-a-penny, but this one brilliantly defies expectations to the very last page. Unsparing, challenging and terrifically compelling.’
Daily Mail

‘…an extraordinary opening, written with such taut understatement that the mother’s grief is given a visceral power: we empathise with it immediately … Whatever You Love is a masterfully constructed novel, at once gripping and tender … The emotional power of Doughty’s prose is such that the reader is complicit in Laura’s journey from loss to retribution. Doughty forces us to confront the darkness that lies beneath the skin. The result is a brilliant and brutal novel that continues to unsettle long after the final page has been turned.’’
The Observer

‘Louise Doughty is a courageous writer, willing to explore deeper territory with each book … Doughty is excellent at small physical details of relationships with children – their scent and skin texture, memories the body retains even if the conscious mind can banish them … Doughty excels at conveying the harrowing grief of Laura’s bereavement and her slow emergence into a world entirely changed by the death of her daughter, and skilfully handles a tense and complex plot. This is a powerful portrait of loss and its psychological consequences.’
The Independent

‘Brilliant, disturbing, heart-wrenching.’
Daily Mirror

‘Brilliantly structured … Like Zoë Heller, Doughty is masterful at combining the texture of ordinary, smugly middle-class, contemporary life with the hidden cliff edges of violence and hatred.’
Sunday Telegraph

‘The opening chapter is electrifyingly painful…The reader is spellbound as we go back through Laura’s failed marriage to David, her unresolved feelings about his new partner Chloe, and her hatred of the driver. I won’t give away the surprise twists in the plot … so powerful is the evocation of raw emotion that, the day after i finished it, I woke up with that same feeling. It was some minutes before I realised I was still inside Doughty’s book.’
Readers Digest

‘The brilliantly constructed narrative … Doughty has crafted a character who’s complex, but always genuine. A compulsive read, this is compelling and unsettling in equal turns’
Northern Echo

‘A stunning tale of grief and the lengths to which a woman must go to come to terms with it.’
Woman and Home