Stephanie Bishop

Author, J B Blackwood, learns that she has won a major literary prize but she can't tell anyone, even her husband Patrick, who can be a gossip, although she does tell her sister who is not really very interested and claims not to have read her books. Patrick is twenty years her senior, was her lecturer when she was a student and is the man she fell deeply in love with, her desire for him being quite without end. They have always enjoyed reading each other's work and commenting, even writing and suggesting ideas when the other one is stuck. But it is J B who is hit with the accusation that she would never have achieved so much without his help. No one ever comments on the help and writing that she has done for him.

J B books a cruise for their fourteenth wedding anniversary so that they can get away and try and overcome some of the mounting problems they seem to be having in their marriage. And so, it is onboard this ship, during a storm that Patrick goes overboard with his body turning up several days later. J B is questionned by the police but then it all goes quiet.

As we move through the book we realise what an unreliable narrator J B is, how memory and what she has written become muddled. Slowly, the layers are peeled back until we see a marriage that started with an unequal power balance and now the balance of power has shifted as wife becomes more successful than the husband.

This is a story of seduction and resentment with a very large dose of desire, both creative and sexual and a meditation on marriage. It incorporates what it means to be an author who has success - book readings, interviews and televison appearances - and where betrayal seems to lie at every turn. It as these appointments appear that we get the true desire of J B to be a winner.… (meer)

A prize winning novelist and her film director husband go off on a cruise to celebrate their wedding anniversary. He fall overboard and dies. Or did he jump? Or was he pushed? The remainder of the book is inside the novelist's head as she comes to terms with her husband's death and its consequences. She has a disconcerting habit of noticing small, irrelevant details of her surroundings even when she is in a stressful situation that you might think demanded her attention. Her mind wanders, she digresses, uninterestingly. Despite the length of time we spend with her and the sympathy inducing situations in which she finds herself she is such a flat, unengaging character we really end up not caring what happens to her. Which is just as well given the ending. Disappointing.… (meer)

Thank you to Grove Press for this ARC.

This book starts out with J.B., who's a writer and her husband Patrick on a cruise. Things happen and he goes overboard. She tries to get away from the press by going to her sister's house in Australia and then abruptly leaves due to an inquiry due to Patrick's drowning. Was it her fault or not? I didn't see what happened coming believe me. Maybe to others it would be obvious but not to me.

This book is very verbose with a lot of sentences that I had to reread to try to understand them. Also, there are no quotations in it which for some reason bothers me but I knew who was talking of course.

It was a pretty big book for my liking but it went faster than I thought it would. I enjoyed it though albeit a little too long like I said.… (meer)