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 the 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: #16610 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-18
• Original language: English
• 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

Review
'Brilliantly captures the sense of a person succumbing to the shock of an emotional tidal wave' Lynne Truss, THE TIMES; 'A gripping analysis of how even the closest bonds never permit us to know another person entirely' OBSERVER; 'Shreve's prose is astonishing; this is a powerful story, beautifully written' SUNDAY TIMES

Anita Brookner
* "Enthralling"

Customer Reviews

A MOSAIC OF AN EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE...
This is a beautifully written novel about a happily married woman, Kathryn Lyons, whose husband, Jack, is an airlines pilot. They have a teen age daughter named Mattie. They live in Kathryn's childhood home in Ely, New Hampshire. For sixteen years, life has been good. Then her husband goes down with his plane, just ten miles off the coast of Ireland, and ever so slowly the very fabric of their life together unravels.

The media frenzy, surrounding the explosion of the plane that her husband was piloting, brings to light the inescapable fact that her husband had been, unbeknownst to her, leading a double life, a life that had not included her or their daughter, but had, most emphatically, excluded them. This is a story of Kathryn's navigation of the emotional roller coaster that was to become her life, as she is thrust into a maelstrom of grief and disbelief, struggling to reconcile her memory of the man she thought she knew, with the reality of who he now appeared to have been.

This is a remarkable book, written in clean, spare prose that underscores some of the very emotion laden issues with which it grapples. At times infinitely sad and poignant, it is a story of betrayal and splintered memories. It is a very absorbing, skillfully told tale of adultery that will hold the reader in its thrall.

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.

A MOSAIC OF AN EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE...
This is a beautifully written novel about a happily married woman, Kathryn Lyons, whose husband, Jack, is an airline pilot. They have a teenage daughter named Mattie. They live in her lovely childhood home in Ely, New Hampshire. For sixteen years life has been good. Then her husband goes down with his plane, just ten miles off the coast of Ireland, and ever so slowly the very fabric of their life together unravels.

The media frenzy, surrounding the explosion of the plane that her husband was piloting, brings to light the plain fact that her husband had been, unbeknownst to her, leading a double life, a life that had not included her or their daughter, but had, most emphatically, excluded them. This is a story of Kathryn's navigation of the emotional roller coaster that was to become her life. She is thrust into a maelstrom of grief and disbelief, as she struggles to reconcile her memory of the man she thought she knew, with the reality of who he now appeared to have been.

This is a remarkable book, written in clean spare prose that underscores some of the very emotion laden issues with which it grapples. At times infinitely sad and poignant, it is a story of betrayal and splintered memories, as well as a very absorbing, skillfully told tale of adultery that will hold the reader in its thrall.