The Quiet Tenant

Did you like Emma Donoughue’s Room? French journalist Michallon’s debut (written in English as a challenge to herself) is for you. Trapped in a garden shed for years is Rachel—well, that’s the name her captor has given her–who’s chained to the floor, fed barely enough, and kept in mortal fear. “I won’t be happy” is her captor’s threat that keeps her in line, and maintaining his brittle composure is her daily struggle. She knows she’s next to his home where he has the life she longs for, with freedom and family. Suddenly, she gets the chance to partake in it, and maybe to escape—but is it all a trick? At the same time, we meet her captor, Aidan, in the outside world, where he’s barely recognizable as a monster who keeps a sex slave. He and his teenage daughter, Cecilia, are the focus of community sympathy and help following the recent death, from cancer, of Aidan’s young wife. The women are the stars of this book, and their inner lives and relationships will draw readers in from page one. “Rachel” obviously takes the central role, with Michallon doing a superb job of portraying her as a well-rounded character who lives in one room, her hopes, memories, and agonies doing the heavy lifting. But there’s also Cecilia, a girl we get to know intimately as she flounders in her grief and tries to make tentative forays outside her father’s strict control, and Emily, a woman who gets to know Aidan in the outside world and shows us a side of him, and of this kind of crime, that’s unexpected and compelling. Psychological drama at its best; the ending had me literally sitting forward, propelling the women on.