STEPHANIE BISHOP

Lucie Blackwood, an acclaimed novelist living in London, has been awarded a major literary prize which she must collect at a ceremony in New York. She tacks the trip on to the end of a cruise she has already booked to celebrate her wedding anniversary. Her much older husband Patrick, a filmmaker, is burnt out, disillusioned and reluctant to travel but Lucie convinces him that a break from it all might be just the thing he needs.

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On the cruise, they rediscover the physical desire that first sparked their relationship many years ago, when Lucie was just a student and Patrick her beguiling, maverick professor. But when a storm hits and Patrick drowns, the search for his body—and for something like the truth—begins.

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Dark, compulsive and often very wry, The Anniversary is that rare beast: a literary novel, exquisitely written, with the pulse of an addictive plot—Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry meets Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Like the work of its narrator, it is also a novel of ideas: how legible, in the mind of the writer, is the line between what is life and what is story? How do we refuse the people we desire? What is the cost, to ourselves, to others and to our art, if we don’t?

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