My Husband
Maud Ventura, Emma Ramadan (trans.)
My Husband
Maud Ventura, Emma Ramadan (trans.)
From the outside, she has an enviable life - a successful career, stunning looks, a beautiful house in the suburbs, two healthy children, and most importantly, an ideal husband. After fifteen years together, she is still besotted with him. But she's never quite sure that her passion is reciprocated.
Determined to keep their relationship perfect, she meticulously prepares for every encounter they have, always taking care to make her actions seem effortless. She watches him attentively, charting every mistake and punishing him accordingly to help him improve. And she tests him - setting traps to make sure that he still loves her just as much as he did when they first met.
Until one day she realizes she may have gone too far . . .
With the surprise of Gone Girl, the bleakness of The Talented Mr Ripley and the sinister charm of the Netflix thriller You, My Husband is a bold and exhilarating story of passion and the dark secrets that lie beneath a seemingly healthy marriage.
Review
Lian Hingee
A few years ago every second domestic thriller came out with breathless marketing comparing it to Gillian Flynn’s bestselling blockbuster Gone Girl. But few (if any) managed to capture the same darkly sly humour; compelling, if abhorrent, narrators; or unsettling reading experience. So it’s with some trepidation that I say My Husband, from debut French writer Maud Ventura, is perfect for fans of Gone Girl. But here we are.
Taking place over the course of a single week, with each chapter corresponding to a single day, My Husband gives readers an insight into what looks, from the outside, to be a perfect marriage. But of course it is as dysfunctional as hell.
Our unnamed narrator has it all: beauty, wealth, a stunning home, two perfect children. She is also absolutely consumed by an obsession with her own husband, contorting her entire existence around him. So tightly wound that she practically vibrates, this wife spends every day carefully cataloguing and interrogating her day-to-day existence in a way that’s both pitiable and unexpectedly comic. For instance, faced with buying flowers for a friend with a new baby, she researches, ‘What kind of flowers do you give for the birth of a child?’ and then agonises over whether roses or peonies are more chic.
Slowly paced with a sinister edge, My Husband keeps the plot moving with little mysteries that are parcelled out by the closely guarded narrator: secret missions to check the letterbox unobserved, seemingly inconsequential lies, a letter that is concealed in different places around the house … The effect is a taut read that keeps you humming with low-level anxiety – and often surprised into nervous laughter.
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