We Keep the Dead Close

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.
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You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.

1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious 23-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment.

Forty years later, Becky Cooper, a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumour proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims.

WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.

© Becky Cooper 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critics Review

  • A brilliant and extraordinary book.

    Philippe Sands

  • Exhilarating … Becky Cooper masterfully uncovers the story of Harvard undergrad Jane Britton

    Vogue

  • Exhilarating and seductive … Haunting, fascinating, and surprising. Cooper will keep you riveted.

  • Ambitious … A highly sophisticated investigation of a cold case mixed with elements of memoir and trendy cultural criticism.

    Spectator

  • This is an astonishing book: circuitous yet taut with suspense, layered yet gripping. Cooper is one hell of a detective, chasing a long-buried murder mystery not only to the victim and her killer, but to the very core of how we understand one another. Most remarkable is how contemporary and vital every bit of questioning Cooper does here feels. Jane Britton died decades ago, but in Cooper’s hands, Britton’s tragic murder teaches us about ourselves and the dangers of the institutions we uphold.

    Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of THE FACT OF A BODY

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