Novel About My Wife

If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, meticulously shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse just couldn't help but kick back in to life. Her hip bones, her red knuckles, the soft skin of her thighs, her fine crackle of hair. When Tom and Ann move from their tiny Camden flat into a large semi-derelict house in Hackney, it feels like the start of proper adulthood, though both are well into their thirties. Ann's room at St Bartholomew's hospital, coated in plaster-dust from the medical casts she moulds all day, is not quite what she had imagined when she was a sassy student at the Slade, while Tom's scriptwriting career seems to have stalled while he tinkers with endless drafts of his vampire movie. But, still deeply in love with his beautiful wife, with a baby on the way and a place of their own, it feels to Tom as though life is on the up. If they sometimes have to rely on credit cards for their weekly shop, well, plenty of aspirational London couples are doing the same. Ann is galvanised by her pregnancy: her long hair loose, her elegant body lent a new luscious fullness, she spends hours cleaning and reorganising the house, and sits up all night talking with a new feverish passion about sculpture. But there is a darker side to this new fervour, somehow linked with her conviction that someone is lingering threateningly around their new home. Someone who - Tom soon realises - may not exist at all. Dark, sensuous and utterly compelling, Novel About my Wife is a sexy, chilling novel about the secrets that lie at the heart of every marriage.