Amy Scribner

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Unmoored overseas

Review by Amy Scribner

An artfully ripped-from-the-headlines tale of college girls studying in Italy, Abroad is a riveting story about the intersection between jealousy and friendship.

Taz, an Irish girl studying in the ancient Etruscan town of Grifonia, spends her first weeks wandering around the city, lonely and lost. When she’s taken in by a group of Brits who, while not particularly kind, always seem to have money and find adventure, Taz is flattered. She spends more and more of her time with the self-named “B4,” who insist on buying her clothes and taking her to exclusive parties.

Taz’s American roommate, Claire, senses the girls are no good and warns Taz. But Taz, who’s never been part of an in-crowd, can’t bring herself to break it off, and things sour further when Taz and Claire fall for the same man. Their once-simple friendship hurtles toward an inevitable conclusion.

Abroad is gorgeously written, with a steady drumbeat of dread infusing every page. Loosely inspired by the Amanda Knox case, it is astonishingly self-assured and perfectly paced without ever taking on a whiff of tabloid sensationalism. Author Katie Crouch (Girls in Trucks) captures the intoxicating—and sometimes dangerous—freedom of being a young student with seemingly limitless choices.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

An artfully ripped-from-the-headlines tale of college girls studying in Italy, Abroad is a riveting story about the intersection between jealousy and friendship.
NonfictionMemoir

Love-hate relationship with the white picket fence

Review by Amy Scribner

Ah, WASPs: Those guilt-ridden, uptight, real estate-obsessed traditionalists. In Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town, Sarah Payne Stuart captures the essence of this distinctive culture, tracing both her own childhood in Concord, Massachusetts, and the lives of some of Concord’s famous residents, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.

Stuart shocks herself when, after years in “the Victorian house of my dreams, thirty minutes from Manhattan,” she and her husband Charlie decide to move back to Concord in a fit of adult homesickness.

“Suddenly my best friends living nearby in the city, my fledgling career, and Charlie’s rise at ABC News meant nothing,” she writes. “Suddenly being cool and wearing a leather jacket while nursing my baby in a Greenwich Village restaurant meant nothing—next to the thought of my children floating toy boats on the Concord River while my mother and I looked on.”

She and Charlie settle into one fixer-upper after another, sinking into debt while they raise their young family. Along the way, Stuart makes peace with her family’s history of repression, hurt and mental illness, and realizes the obvious parallels between her own family and other Concordians who have tried to rewrite their histories. (To wit: Despite Alcott’s cozy, seemingly autobiographical portrait of Marmee and her little women, Alcott’s real mother was a shrill martyr and her father a delusional freeloader.)

Stuart writes honestly and lovingly about her aging parents, her childhood, money, the trials of parenthood and keeping her marriage afloat. In other words, everything. Perfectly Miserable is a gorgeously rendered portrait of modern life—and a reminder that some things never change.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ah, WASPs: Those guilt-ridden, uptight, real estate-obsessed traditionalists. In Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town, Sarah Payne Stuart captures the essence of this distinctive culture, tracing both her own childhood in Concord, Massachusetts, and the lives of some of Concord’s famous residents, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.

FictionHorror

Miraculous survivors, or harbingers of end times?

Review by Amy Scribner

In this fascinating and deeply creepy novel by South African author Sarah Lotz, four commercial flights go down on the same day. Everyone on board perishes except three children: a British preteen named Jess; an American boy named Bobby; and a Japanese boy named Hiro. The children are uninjured, but their personalities have changed.

Just one other person survives, albeit briefly: Pamela Donald, a middle-aged Texan who lives long enough to record a mysterious message on her phone. Her pastor, Len Vorhees, who has been trying to break into the big leagues of televangelism, uses the message to start a new cult of “Pamelists,” who believe the three surviving children signal the apocalypse. Rapture Fever is soon spreading around the nation.

Trailed by religious zealots and under intense media scrutiny, the orphans and their new caregivers are forced into seclusion, even as the children’s behavior grows more unsettling. Is it the result of surviving a harrowing disaster, or something else?

The Three is nifty in part because it is a book within a book. Investigative journalist Elspeth Martins has searched out everyone remotely connected to the crashes: the paramedics who responded to the crash in Africa; the prostitute sleeping with Pastor Len; Bobby’s grandmother, who suspects that Bobby has somehow eased his grandfather’s severe Alzheimer’s. The novel is at its eerie best with the transcription of voice recordings by Jess’ Uncle Paul, who slowly descends into madness as he tries to determine what’s wrong with his niece.

Lotz has honed her writing skills as a screenwriter and YA author, and here she spins a tail of disaster and fanaticism that is both entertaining and scarily realistic. The Three is the real deal: gripping, unpredictable and utterly satisfying.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this fascinating and deeply creepy novel by South African author Sarah Lotz, four commercial flights go down on the same day. Everyone on board perishes except three children: a British preteen named Jess; an American boy named Bobby; and a Japanese boy named Hiro. The children are uninjured, but their personalities have changed.

FictionLiterary Fiction

On the road in the wake of grief

Review by Amy Scribner

Writer Kaui Hart Hemmings had a lot to live up to with her second novel: Her best-selling, polished debut, The Descendants, was made into an Oscar-winning film starring George Clooney. With The Possibilities, she delivers on her early promise while making a striking departure setting-wise, moving from the tropical islands of her native Hawaii to the snowy mountains of Colorado.

After Sarah St. John’s 22-year-old son Cully dies in a skiing accident, she struggles to return to life. Her job as a co-host of a Breckenridge travel show (the kind of cheesy production that is shown on hotel TV channels) suddenly seems meaningless. Her widowed dad, who has been staying with her, seems to be making that arrangement permanent. And Cully’s dad Billy, whom Sarah never married, is back in the picture in a confusing way. Then a lovely but mysterious young woman named Kit shows up at Sarah’s house, with news that will send the family reeling.

Sarah hits the road with Billy, her dad, her best friend and Kit, heading to a memorial service at Cully’s college. This motley crew finds out a lot about themselves and each other, and they’re forced to make some difficult choices. And yet, Hemmings manages to make this road trip as hilarious as it is touching, punctuated with knockout dialogue.

Hemmings has a unique voice—both sensitive and humorous. In her hands, Sarah is all-too-human, a middle-aged woman who struggles to redefine herself after losing the child she raised mostly on her own. “I close my eyes and imagine his possibilities, the different hues of his self, what his face would look like in ten years, the kind of man he would be,” Sarah says. “He never had the chance to become himself. He never had the chance to be anyone else.”

While The Possibilities is a book ostensibly about death, it is at its core really about life—in all its messy, funny, hurtful, confusing and transcendent moments.  

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Kaui Hart Hemmings about The Possibilities.

Writer Kaui Hart Hemmings had a lot to live up to with her second novel: Her best-selling, polished debut, The Descendants, was made into an Oscar-winning film starring George Clooney. With The Possibilities, she delivers on her early promise while making a striking departure setting-wise, moving from the tropical islands of her native Hawaii to the snowy mountains of Colorado.

NonfictionMemoir

Strength for the journey

Review by Amy Scribner

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, May 2014

Robin Roberts took a leave of absence as co-host of “Good Morning America” in 2012 to face a life-threatening battle with a blood disorder, one that likely was caused by the chemotherapy she endured during a bout with breast cancer five years earlier. In Everybody’s Got Something, Roberts manages to “make her mess her message,” as her beloved mother always advised her to do. Roberts is both astonishingly honest and refreshingly upbeat as she recounts the shock of discovering she once again had to fight for her life.

A hall-of-fame college basketball player, Roberts had always depended on her body to deliver. Yet here she was, searching for a blood marrow donor upon whom she would now depend. Miraculously, her sister Sally-Ann was a near-perfect match, and was willing to travel between her home in New Orleans and Robin’s in Manhattan to undergo the lengthy process needed to allow doctors to harvest blood cells for her baby sister.

In the midst of this health crisis, Roberts’ mother passed away after years of declining health. It’s a crushing blow to Roberts, who spoke to her mom every day after wrapping GMA. But as her mother often told her, everybody’s got something they’re dealing with. Robin returns to New York and dives into a brutal chemotherapy regimen that essentially destroys her immune system so that Sally-Ann’s healthy blood cells can rebuild it.

Roberts, who wrote this book with author Veronica Chambers, exudes warmth and love as she recalls one of the hardest times in her life, giving credit to her GMA co-hosts and her many “dear friends” (she must use this phrase dozens of times throughout the book—girlfriend’s got a lot of friends) for their support. She also opens up about her longtime love, Amber, who nurses her through the illness and shares some of her own caretaking advice in the book.

Delivered with candor and optimism, Everybody’s Got Something is a remarkable book that offers a blueprint for handling crises with grace and faith.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, May 2014

Robin Roberts took a leave of absence as co-host of “Good Morning America” in 2012 to face a life-threatening battle with a blood disorder, one that likely was caused by the chemotherapy she endured during a bout with breast cancer five years earlier. In Everybody’s Got Something, Roberts manages to “make her mess her message,” as her beloved mother always advised her to do.

NonfictionMemoir

A chaotic Southern childhood

Review by Amy Scribner

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, April 2014

Frances Mayes’ lyrical memoir of growing up Southern was a long time coming. Worried about upsetting her family, she stopped and started Under Magnolia many times over: “Anytime I felt the impulse to start my Southern opus again, I instead headed for a movie or a new Thai restaurant,” she writes. “I’d go jogging or read a novel until the impulse faded.”

Thank goodness she finally gave in to her impulses to dare alla luce, as the Tuscans say, to give the book to the light. This memoir from the author of Under the Tuscan Sun is a lovely, soul-baring look back at growing up in Fitzgerald, Georgia, the youngest of three daughters. Her family was chaotic, to say the least. Her parents were at war with each other from the first drink of the day, desperately unhappy but unable to make changes.

“I said many things to myself by the age of seven,” Mayes writes. “If I ever get out of here, I will never select unhappiness. When the plate of unhappiness is passed around and more and more is offered, I’ll say no thank you, no. But they wanted seconds, thirds.”

Much younger than her sisters, Mayes bore the brunt of her parents’ dysfunction. Her saving graces were books and Willie Bell, the woman who had been working for the family since before Mayes was born. Less confidant and more co-conspirator, Willie Bell took care of Mayes in her own brusque way: feeding her, advising her to go play outside to escape the toxic house.

Mayes also recalls her cloistered years at Randolph-Macon, the women’s college in Virginia where she cultivated some of her deepest friendships and her deep love of writing. (“We began to forget we were supposed to please men,” she writes. “There weren’t any.”).

Under Magnolia is a gorgeous, dreamy remembrance of hot Southern afternoons, mothers in red lipstick and Shalimar, Elvis turned up loud to cover up the family troubles that ran deep. An unflinching love song to her simultaneously rich and troubled childhood, it is Mayes’ most generous work yet.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Frances Mayes for Under Magnolia.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, April 2014

Frances Mayes’ lyrical memoir of growing up Southern was a long time coming. Worried about upsetting her family, she stopped and started Under Magnolia many times over: “Anytime I felt the impulse to start my Southern opus again, I instead headed for a movie or a new Thai restaurant,” she writes. “I’d go jogging or read a novel until the impulse faded.”

FictionHistorical Fiction

Seduction and schemes from the pianoforte seat

Review by Amy Scribner

To marry their daughters off, four social-climbing men in 1790s London hatch a plot: Buy a pianoforte (the au courant instrument of the late 18th century) and have them give a concert that will have noblemen lined up for their hands in marriage.

The ladies are as varied as their fathers are ambitious: emaciated Georgiana; Everina with her unfortunate false teeth; mysterious Alathea; and the Brass sisters, practical Harriet and lumpy Marianne.

The men hire a French pianist to teach the daughters, but Monsieur Belladroit has another agenda. He is working for the bitter man who made the pianoforte, whose own daughter is disfigured and will never be married off. Belladroit is paid to sabotage the girls’ performance, seducing them one by one as part of their training. Only Alathea, smart and independent, is immune to him. But she hides a dark secret about her relationship with her father, and her struggle to get out from under his control ends in a shocking act of violence.

Sedition could easily have dissolved into semi-kinky melodrama, a chronicle of Belladroit’s conquests. Thanks to author Katharine Grant’s sly writing, it never does. Just when things get tense, she lightens the mood with a dose of the competitive girls comparing notes on Belladroit, or even better, their truly doltish fathers comparing notes on their brilliant scheme. As the disastrous lessons progress, the clueless fathers congratulate themselves: “The die was cast; they could relax, though Brass had been stirring things, asking what would happen if Harriet married a duke and Marianne a baronet. Would one set of grandchildren have to bow to another?”

Grant is better known as K.M. Grant, an author of children’s books, including the de Granville trilogy. Sedition is her first adult novel, and while the ending may be a little too tidy for some, the book remains a thumping debut filled with sex, manipulation and a dash of romance. Wickedly dark and provocative, Sedition is a bold reminder that the thirst for power and status remains unquenched over the ages.

To marry their daughters off, four social-climbing men in 1790s London hatch a plot: Buy a pianoforte (the au courant instrument of the late 18th century) and have them give a concert that will have noblemen lined up for their hands in marriage.

The ladies are as varied as their fathers are ambitious: emaciated Georgiana; Everina with her unfortunate false teeth; mysterious Alathea; and the Brass sisters, practical Harriet and lumpy Marianne.

FictionDebut Fiction

Married to the bomb

Review by Amy Scribner

The women came from all over the nation—even the world—with little or no idea why they were moving to a remote New Mexico town with only a post office box for an address. They were the wives of scientists working at a secret research laboratory to build the first atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project is a storied chapter in American history, its products used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less well recorded are the voices of the women who lived there in the early 1940s, raising families and struggling to build a community in the harsh climate and secretive environment of Los Alamos.

The Wives of Los Alamos is written in the first person plural (“we”), a surprisingly effective choice by Nesbit. It helps paint the picture of a generation of women who, while diverse in many ways, were still products of their time, following their husbands virtually without question.

“What did we think our husbands were doing in the lab?” Nesbit writes. “We suspected, because the military was involved, that they were building a communication device, a rocket, or a new weapon. We ruled out submarines because we were in the desert—but we closely considered types of code breaking.”

The conditions were stark: a dusty, windy, mysterious military base where food was rationed and showers were a luxury. Some families buckled under the harsh conditions. Yet Nesbit shows that the women found ways to adapt and even have fun, with morning neighborhood coffees and evening dances giving shape to their social lives.

“We felt the freedom of living in isolation,” she writes, “and so, on the weekends, fenced in as we were, we celebrated and square-danced, we let go. We often work the next morning with no water and spent the day reeking of rum, and our lungs burned from smoking so many cigarettes. We wanted what we could many times not have: coffee, a shower.”

Nesbit made use of oral histories and archival documents to detail for the first time the lives of these young women who until now were forgotten in the history books. It is a stunningly original and thought-provoking debut novel.

The women came from all over the nation—even the world—with little or no idea why they were moving to a remote New Mexico town with only a post office box for an address. They were the wives of scientists working at a secret research laboratory to build the first atomic bomb.

NonfictionHistory

Carving a way to the Pacific Northwest

Review by Amy Scribner

The damp practically floats off the pages in Astoria, the sweeping tale of John Jacob Astor’s attempt to settle the remote Pacific Northwest coast in 1810. Astor’s vast wealth enabled him to send two expeditions: one over land and one by ship. His plan was to set up a fur trade, the first on this particularly harsh stretch of the West Coast. Whoever could settle the area would lay claim to a vast area rich with sea otter and beaver fur, salmon and other seafood.

It’s hard to decide which party had the rougher journey. The overland party climbed snowy mountains, nearly starved and was attacked by Native Americans. The seafarers didn’t do much better, a motley crew of Americans and Scots who encountered rogue waves, endured water shortages and squabbled their way around Cape Horn to the rocky coastline where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean.

Author Peter Stark retraces the journey in spellbinding detail, making use of journals to get inside the minds of these explorers who set out just two years after Lewis and Clark successfully crossed the continent.

“We climbed mountains so high that I could hardly believe our horses would get over them,” wrote Wilson Price Hunt, whom Astor chose to lead the overland party. “We could advance only with the greatest difficulty because of the sharp rocks, and the precipices plunge to the very banks of the river.”

Almost half of the 140 travelers died before ever laying eyes on Astoria. Those who did straggle in to the muddy settlement found something other than paradise awaiting them.

“[I]magine the rude shock of arrival in the coastal winter or early spring,” Stark writes. “It’s cold, it’s raining—as it is nearly two hundred days a year at the mouth of the Columbia—the infinite gray coastline stretches away backed by the thick, dark rainforest—soggy, choked with rotting cedar logs, prehistoric sword ferns, and the dark columns of towering fir and spruce whose outstretched limbs are draped with lichen in giant, ghostly cobwebs.”

Stark is a correspondent for Outside, and his outdoor-writing bona fides are put to excellent use here. Astoria brings to life a harrowing era of American exploration.

The damp practically floats off the pages in Astoria, the sweeping tale of John Jacob Astor’s attempt to settle the remote Pacific Northwest coast in 1810. Astor’s vast wealth enabled him to send two expeditions: one over land and one by ship. His plan was to set up a fur trade, the first on this particularly harsh stretch of the West Coast. Whoever could settle the area would lay claim to a vast area rich with sea otter and beaver fur, salmon and other seafood.

PoliticsMemoir

The politics of a lasting marriage

Review by Amy Scribner

One of the unlikeliest marriages in American history—between a staunch conservative and a diehard liberal—is still going strong after 20 years.

In their sparkling and revealing memoir Love & War, Mary Matalin and James Carville recount the ups and downs of their very public life together: the 2000 presidential recount, Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina (Carville is a Louisiana native). Throughout it all, the pair has stayed together while remaining on the opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Matalin comes across as a sharply funny and deeply intelligent woman, a fiercely loyal friend and a wonderfully supportive mom. But she also, improbably, manages to make even the famously over-the-top Carville sound measured:

“James led the charge for the wayward, I-never-inhaled, Southern-fried-but-elite-educated, liberal-in-centrist’s-sheepskin candidate, Bill Clinton,” Matalin writes about their time on the 1992 presidential campaign trail. “I was the one who stood by the ultimate statesman, an honest man and lifelong public servant, George H.W. Bush—aka ‘Poppy’ to me—the fantastic, accomplished incumbent who deserved victory but had it snatched away by a perfect storm generated by a next-gen Southern stud and an old-gen crackpot, Ross Perot.” 

Carville still works in a few zingers of his own: “Conservatives—and I know this because I live with one—literally view it as a kind of a weakness to talk to people other than themselves,” he writes. “The conservative media landscape is the biggest echo chamber going. They love to reinforce their beliefs, day after day.”

Despite their big lives at the center of American politics, Love & War is at its heart a lovely he-said, she-said exchange on the ordinary struggles of marriage in the modern age: Negotiating on which features they wanted in a home in New Orleans, where they moved in 2007. Carville’s hurt feelings when his middle-school daughters suddenly found him embarrassing. The pain of losing parents and friends (granted, in this case, the friend was Tim Russert).

Their genuine affection and respect comes through even when they’re skewering each others’ political beliefs. And Carville sums up neatly their secret to success: “I’d rather stay happily married than pick a fight with my wife over politics.” 

 

One of the unlikeliest marriages in American history—between a staunch conservative and a diehard liberal—is still going strong after 20 years.

Fiction

One loner, looking for love

Review by Amy Scribner

Author Matthew Quick probably is tired of hearing the word “quirky,” but it really is the singularly best way to describe his storytelling. After his first novel, The Silver Linings Playbook, was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, Quick delivers a new story featuring Bartholomew Neil, a uniquely likable protagonist who at nearly 40 has lived with his mother his entire life.

Bartholomew might be a little stunted—he’s never had a girlfriend or, really, any friends other than his local priest—but he has a good heart and takes good care of his mom. When brain cancer leaves his mom confused and disoriented, she begins referring to Bartholomew as “Richard.” Bartholomew assumes she is confusing him with her idol, actor Richard Gere. 

The Good Luck of Right Now is told in the form of Bartholomew’s letters to Gere after his mom’s death. It’s a risky approach that pays off big: The book is witty, funny and real, and Bartholomew’s voice is candid and innocent. The grieving Bartholomew slowly ventures out into the world, befriending another misfit in group therapy and taking in his priest, Father McNamee. 

Bartholomew sets a few life goals, like having a beer in a bar with an age-appropriate friend and pursuing Girlbrarian, the lovely but withdrawn woman who shelves books at his local library. “Her long brown hair . . . covers her face like a waterfall can cover the entrance to a mysterious cave,” Bartholomew writes. 

The story reaches its zenith when Bartholomew, his friend from therapy, Father McNamee and Girlbrarian take a revealing road trip to Montreal that is both hilarious and heartbreaking. The Good Luck of Right Now is a knockout of a book that has something for everyone: humor, wisdom, plot twists, wholly original characters and Richard Gere. 

Author Matthew Quick probably is tired of hearing the word “quirky,” but it really is the singularly best way to describe his storytelling. After his first novel, The Silver Linings Playbook, was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, Quick delivers a new story featuring Bartholomew Neil, a uniquely likeable protagonist who at nearly 40 has lived with his mother his entire life.

FictionWomen's FictionDebut Fiction

‘Real Housewives’ star surprises with a sympathetic debut novel

Review by Amy Scribner

I was skeptical when I found out the author of The Widow’s Guide to Sex and Dating stars on “The Real Housewives of New York.” And when the epigram was a Lady Gaga quote, I thought I was in for a long slog. What a pleasant surprise, then, when the book turned out to be one of the richest, most deeply satisfying stories I’ve read in a long time.

At 32, Claire Byrne is smart, beautiful and married to famous author and sexologist Charlie Byrne. She dabbles in magazine writing, but is mostly content in his larger-than-life shadow, following him from party to party around Manhattan, where he’s never short on opinions and admirers. “He gave her entrée into the elite upper reaches of words and the people who traded in them; she gave him a wide swath,” Radziwill writes.

Then Charlie is improbably killed by a falling piece of art while walking home from a tryst with his publicist, and Claire finds herself with the burden (opportunity?) of redefining her life as a widow. She fumbles through dates set up by well-intentioned girlfriends, drinks a lot of wine, sleeps too much and consults a ridiculous series of questionable therapists.

When Charlie’s editor asks Claire to finish Charlie’s last book, Claire finds herself face-to-face with the book’s subject, movie star Jack Huxley. As their relationship deepens, Claire has to decide whether she is willing to step into someone else’s shadow again.

An award-winning former TV reporter, Radziwill is also the author of the well-received What Remains—a memoir of her marriage, which ended when her husband died of cancer in 1999. It’s hard to know how much of her own experience colors this debut novel. What is clear is that her spare writing and wry voice make The Widow’s Guide an exhilarating, insightful and moving story about loss and identity. 

I was skeptical when I found out the author of The Widow’s Guide to Sex and Dating stars on “The Real Housewives of New York.” And when the epigram was a Lady Gaga quote, I thought I was in for a long slog. What a pleasant surprise, then, when the book turned out to be one of the richest, most deeply satisfying stories I’ve read in a long time.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

You and me and our secret make three

Review by Amy Scribner

When you are a rational human being, with free will and agency, is there any such thing as a point of no return? That’s the question Yvonne Carmichael finds herself asking after she’s charged with murder in this dark, intense, wholly engrossing British import, Apple Tree Yard.

A well-known London scientist, Yvonne has spent her life on the straight-and-narrow: successful career, two grown children, happy if ho-hum marriage. (“The reason he ambles into the kitchen and asks for his car keys is not that he is incapable of locating them himself; it is to remind me that after many years of marriage, he still loves me,” she muses during their morning routine.)

Then Yvonne meets a mysterious man while walking back to her office after a routine meeting, and begins an affair. She starts making dicey choices, including a public tryst in an alleyway called Apple Tree Yard with thousands of commuters walking by just a few feet away.

Later that night, Yvonne is the victim of a savage sexual assault, and soon suspects her attacker is stalking her. Going to the authorities would risk uncovering her affair, so she enlists her lover to help scare off the attacker. But things go horribly wrong, and suddenly this woman who has played by the rules all her life finds herself judged by a wholly different standard.

Novelist and journalist Louise Doughty is a masterful writer, improbably making Yvonne a sympathetic, insightful character even as she is cheating, lying and generally making the worst possible life choices. Doughty also perfectly captures the quiet details of domestic life, the erotic charge of a high-stakes affair, the crackling drama of a courtroom. She dispatches the notion that we are masters of our own fate, chillingly illustrating how quickly we can derail our own lives.

When you are a rational human being, with free will and agency, is there any such thing as a point of no return? That’s the question Yvonne Carmichael finds herself asking after she’s charged with murder in this dark, intense, wholly engrossing British import, Apple…

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