Product Description

Who can guess what a woman will do when the unthinkable becomes her reality? From the bestselling author of THE WEIGHT OF WATER, this enormously gripping and powerfully wrought novel asks questions we all have about ourselves and definitively places Anita Shreve among the ranks of the best novelists writing today.

Being married to a pilot has taught Kathryn Lyons to be ready for emergencies, but nothing has prepared her for the late-night knock on her door and the news of her husband's fatal crash. As Kathryn struggles through her grief, she is forced to confront disturbing rumours about the man she loved and the life that she took for granted. Torn between her impulse to protect her husband's memory and her desire to know the truth, Kathryn sets off to find out if she ever really knew the man who was her husband. In her determination to test the truth of her marriage, she faces shocking revelations about the secrets a man can keep and the actions a woman is willing to take.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9654 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-18
• Binding: Paperback
• 293 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
With five novels to her credit, including the acclaimed The Weight of Water, Anita Shreve now offers a skilfully crafted exploration of the long reach of tragedy in The Pilot's Wife. News of Jack Lyons's fatal crash sends his wife into shock and emotional numbness:

Kathryn wished she could manage a coma. Instead, it seemed that quite the opposite had happened: She felt herself to be inside of 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 ... 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.

The situation becomes even more dire when the plane's black box is recovered, pinning responsibility for the crash on Jack. In an attempt to clear his name, Kathryn searches for any and all clues to the hours before the flight. Yet each discovery forces her to realise that she didn't know her husband of 16 years at all. Shreve's complex and highly convincing treatment of Kathryn's dilemma, coupled with intriguing minor characters and an expertly paced plot, makes The Pilot's Wife really take off. --James Barry

THE TIMES
THE WEIGHT OF WATER* "Compelling and beautifully written"

Anita Brookner
* "Enthralling"

Customer Reviews

enjoyable read
A beautifully written novel, the discovery of another life for Captain Jack Lyons was not entirely a shock as I had read the summary and critiques at the back of the book before hand. However, the way in which Kathryn was portrayed I wanted to turn the page and find out they had the wrong man and her life would be back to normal. I thought the author had a beautiful grasp of language and her discription of the emotions of the characters. An enjoyable read and I am sure I will sample some of her other work.

How Well Do You Know Your Spouse?
The Pilot's Wife looks at that common subject of modern fiction, alienation that separates nonreligious from one another. Of course, many people feel like they are married to (or living with) a soul mate who is closely bonded into an understanding symbiosis of two. About half the time, someone must be wrong in that belief because about half of all marriages (and more than that of live-in relationships) hit the rocks.

Anita Shreve chooses an unusual way to display the reality of alienation, by having one spouse die while the other is presented with a mystery about what the other person was thinking and doing. Do spouses keep secrets from one another? Sure. In this case, the secrets undermine the sense of security that heroine Kathryn Lyons used to have in her marriage.

The story opens with the kind of situation that Stephen King so likes to present, Kathryn is awakened by knocking on the door in the middle of the night while her husband is away flying commercially for a major airline. She reluctantly opens the door to be greeted by Robert Hart, from her husband's union, to tell her husband's plane has been lost. Within seconds, she is in the middle of a public relations maelstrom as the media begin their feeding frenzy to show the public horror-stricken grief. Kathryn has to remain strong; she still has a daughter at home to protect.

As the nightmare becomes increasingly real, Ms. Shreve drops other nasty surprises into Kathryn's lap until she's so weighed down by the weight of adversity that she can barely move. Each time she thinks it is as bad as it can get, it gets worse.

The plot in this story is quite strong, giving us a chance to get to know who Kathryn is. From that point of view, the book is very successful. Some will find the plot a little too fanciful to be credible. But I'm sure stranger things have happened.

Ultimately, the book's weakness is that too much is predictable. A little more suspense would have been good. Try to avoid reading spoilers about the plot. They will reduce your pleasure in the book quite a lot.

Those who like sensitive people will be pleased to see that Kathryn, her grandmother, and Robert Hart display that fine quality.

I liked the reading by Mary Peiffer better than the book. I recommend you find this recording by Books on Tape if you can.

Not the best Shreve book I have read......
Kathryn gets a knock at the door in the middle of the night and her life begins to unravel. Her husband has been killed in a mid-air explosion en route to US from London. She and her teenage daughter are both distraught and are comforted by Robert, sent by the airline, and Kathryn's grandmother Julia. It soon becomes clear that her "good marriage" may not have been all she thought. She travels to London to try to find out the truth behind her husband's double life. Meanwhile the press are suggesting suicide by Jack (and at the same time killing a hundred other people) caused by a bomb brought on the plane by him.

This is not the best Shreve book I have read. The prose is lovely and the emotions of Kathryn and Mattie are well handled and believable and the character of Julia is strong. Muire is much less real and the plot all a bit contrived......

The ending is ambivalent which suits the tone of the book.