How to be a Good Wife - Emma Chapman

‘And there it is again, that strange echoing fear, slipping through the cracks that have formed in the memory.’

This is a haunting debut novel with a mesmerising voice at its heart.

Marta recounts the events in her days to us and we question what is real and true. She has been married to Hector, twenty years her senior, for many years, and their son Kylan is grown-up and lives away from home now. Marta keenly feels his absence.

Marta’s days are structured, she checks the time a lot, she goes to the market at a set time. She has no friends, and is dominated by Hector and by her mother-in-law Matilda. The atmospheric setting is an unnamed Scandinavian town.

She has stopped taking her medication and finds that memories are resurfacing of a room, and a girl with blonde hair keeps appearing before Marta. Who is she, does Marta recognize her, is she from the past, why does she seem increasingly familiar?

‘Looking over my shoulder, I see myself in the steamed mirror. I don’t want to push the girl away, to deny these things I have been seeing. There’s a sense that it would be fruitless anyway: like trying to sink a cork in a basin full of water. It will always rise to the surface again.’

Marta begins to doubt the whole basis that her current life is founded on and her husband Hector seems to then be cast in a different light.

How to be a Good Wife boasts a gripping narrative with Marta’s arresting voice. She thinks she recalls images from her past, but are they real? Is what she remembers the truth, is she paranoid, is it the effect of having stopped taking her medication?

She doubts herself, her imaginings, and the reader doubts her too. I totally believed in her, and was scared and anxious as I read on, riveted.

The feeling of Marta being trapped is utterly real. Her marriage, her home, the place she lives, it all feels so claustrophobic.

I wanted to know how this woman’s life could have been so curtailed, her identity reduced to almost nothing, and why, by whom – by her own illness and limitations, by the calm yet crippling control of her husband, by her forgotten past?

This is intelligent fiction, making the reader think and question everything. Is Marta an unreliable narrator or is everything she says and thinks true? Can she trust her husband, can she trust her own senses – the smells she recalls, the sounds she is hearing, the sights that appear to her.

‘There is something, just out of reach, which I can feel shifting inside me. I shut my eyes, willing it to come forward. It’s a smell first, of detergent and sweat, and a rapid image that shuttles before my eyes too fast for me to grasp….The picture spreads for a moment like ink through blotting paper, and then just as quickly, it is gone.’

It’s an emotional, edgy experience to read this book, riddled as it is with uncertainty and deception.

This is an amazing, cleverly written debut by Emma Chapman; it is compelling, insightful and unsettling – I was hooked throughout and have been thinking about it a lot; it keeps a hold of you long after you've finished reading.

Reviewed by Lindsay Healy

Published by Picador on 3rd January 2013
Reviewed as part of the amazon vine programme

You can follow the author on twitter @emmajchapman

The Painted Bridge - Wendy Wallace

It is 1859 when Anna Palmer is cruelly incarcerated against her will by her husband Vincent in a Victorian asylum near London named Lake House. This private asylum houses genteel women supposedly needing a rest and a cure, those who have delicate sensibilities. Having realised what has happened to her, and what Lake House actually is, Anna immediately sets about trying to prove there is nothing wrong with her and that she doesn’t belong there and should be allowed to leave immediately. She appeals unsuccessfully to her uncaring husband to let her return home.

Lucas St Clair is a physician working at the asylum, employing the very new medium of photography in his work with the patients, believing that it may perhaps be used to shed light on the health of their minds.

Anna is subject to cruel treatments in the asylum that were common in those days, supposedly in the name of a cure. Initially she wants little to do with the other residents, but slowly she lets her guard down and finds more in common with some of them than she first expected. Alongside some companionship with the owner’s daughter, and her meetings with Lucas St Clair, they are of course the only people who can help reduce her feelings of isolation and from whom she can gain strength and solidarity.

I was gripped by the storyline right from the start. I felt sad at the helpless situation Anna found herself in, and angry at the ease with which she was locked away there by her husband. The author highlights the cruelties and injustices of the system and of society prevalent in those times, leaving women with little or no say in their own destiny, and locked away for feeling low or anxious, or just not behaving as expected. The writer caused me to care about Anna and share her feeling of being trapped, and I was willing her to find an escape somehow.

I loved the author’s use of language, and the names she created for some of the characters at Lake House struck me as perfect.

There is beautiful and convincing period detail throughout this intelligent, perceptive historical novel, and the author has evidently researched her topics well, but is never heavy handed with the details. I found it particularly interesting to read about this early use of photography, the processes involved, and this theory that it may enlighten a doctor as to the mental health of patients. Will Anna be able to prove her sanity? What is the truth about her past, and her husband? The lines between truth, reality and fact become blurred until we are unsure quite what to believe at times.

The hardback edition of this novel has beautiful endpapers which complement it very well.

This is a fascinating, emotional and compelling debut novel with engaging characters and a strong storyline throughout. This is a book that I would definitely read a second time. I am really looking forward to reading the next novel by this author. 

Published by Simon & Schuster

You can follow the author on twitter @slangular and visit her website here.

Thank you very much to the publisher for the opportunity to meet this author at their book bloggers event recently. Thank you very much to Wendy for being so friendly and happy to discuss her book and her work.