Alice Thompson was born in Edinburgh. She is the former keyboard player of post-punk eighties band, The Woodentops. She won The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Justine. Her second novel, Pandora’s Box, was shortlisted for The Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. Her other novels are Pharos, The Falconer, The Existential Detective, Burnt Island, The Book Collector and, most recently, Chimera. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Edinburgh University.

If you can have degrees of uncanniness, The Existential Detective is Thompson's uncanniest – and best – novel yet. Private detective William Blake is hired by an eccentric scientist to find his missing wife, Louise, who may have lost her memory. Just as Freud's theory of the Uncanny insists that a man wandering around lost will repeatedly fetch up in the red-light district, Will's search takes him to a brothel and to a nightclub, where he develops a sexual obsession with a singer.