The Pilot's Wife

Anita Shreve

You will feel the same shock and experience the same range of emotions as Kathryn Lyons on hearing about her pilot husband's death in an air crash. Worse is to follow as the truth about his double life pushes her to the very edge. She finds out things about Jack that she did not know, things that she did not need to know, and things that she did not want to know, and is left wondering if you can ever truly know the people that you love. Sounds like a bad TV movie? Fear not - this gripping novel never descends into sentimentality. It all feels far too real.

Extract

Kathryn wished she herself could manage a coma. Instead, she felt herself to be inside a private weather system, one in which she was continuously tossed and buffeted by bits of news and information, sometimes chilled by thoughts of what lay immediately ahead, thawed by the kindness of others (Julia and Robert and strangers), frequently drenched by memories that seemed to have no regard for circumstance or place, and then subjected to the nearly intolerable heat of reporters, photographers and curious onlookers. It was a weather system with no logic, she had decided, no pattern, no progression, no form.

Parallels