The Love of a Bad Man - Couverture souple

The Love of a Bad Man imagines the inner lives of historical figures who committed crimes all in the name of love ... The stories treat death with a gothic inevitability and explore human darkness with a light touch. --Lou Heinrich, The Guardian

[Woollett] raises unnerving questions about the nature of desire: about why any of us are drawn to people who are bad, or bad for us, and why we stay with them. That she refuses to answer them is not to the detriment of The Love of a Bad Man, and in fact ensures that the collection never feels gimmicky ... The stories are entirely concerned with conveying the distinctive interiority of the women, with the exploration of their impulses and insecurities. It is by the accretion of these case studies, rather than by armchair psychologising her girls, that Woollett builds her case. --Veronica Sullivan, The Lifted Brow

A genuinely fresh reading experience ... we're sure to hear a lot more from this talented writer in coming years. FOUR STARS --Books+Publishing

Laura Elizabeth Woollett was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia. She moved to Melbourne after high school and, in 2012, completed an honours degree in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. Her first novel, The Wood of Suicides, was written while she was an undergraduate, and concerns a teacher-student relationship. It was published in the US in early 2014. The same year, she was awarded a Wheeler Centre/Readings Foundation Hot Desk Fellowship and the John Marsden/Hachette Prize for Fiction. In 2015, she was chosen as one of Melbourne Writers Festival s 30 Under 30 . She is currently at work on her second novel, Beautiful Revolutionary, about a young counterculture couple who become involved with Jim Jones Peoples Temple in late 60s California.