Look What You Made Me Do

Couples facing upheaval, from romantic to criminal, are under the microscope in Whitbread award-winning Lanchester’s unusual thriller. The book opens at Oxford University in the 1980s, where we meet a young woman, Kate, who’s obsessed with another student after seeing him just once. With internet sleuthing not yet possible, we get a refresher on how stalking happened before social media as well as a reminder that people were no less devious back then. In the current day, TV-writer Phoebe is finding her first success; her show Cheating is suddenly what everyone’s talking about. At the same time, Kate’s just lost her husband and finds that her relationship with him is almost perfectly depicted in the show, with unique language they shared used by the show’s cheating partners, far past the point of coincidence. Kate is devastated, with Lanchester’s writing of the character’s grief and shock a realistic visit to the fog of loss. Twists come into play to bring the stories together and the ending, which takes the “dish best served cold” to incredible extremes, is both satisfying and strikingly strange.—Henrietta Thornton