He Said He Would Be Late
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A fast-paced, twisty psychological debut about the complexities of marriage and new motherhood, told through the frenetic lens of a wife seeking the truth about her husband, at all costs, as the validity of the life she once knew unravels page by page.
Liz Bennett knows that she is one of the lucky ones. Wealthy and charming, Arno is a supportive husband to Liz and a doting father to their daughter, Emma. A rising banker at a top firm in the Boston area, he is the picture of perfection, rounding off their idyllic New England life. But when Liz sees a text on Arno's phone with a kissy-face emoji, her anxiety kicks into overdrive and she begins to worry that her luck has run out.
In Justine Sullivan's ingenious debut, He Said He Would Be Late, a wife decides—as any wife would—that she must uncover the truth about her husband. So she takes a deep breath and dives down the rabbit hole. As Liz peels back layers of deceit and tracks down every lead, a frenzy begins to take over her life. Could Arno really be unfaithful? Or is Liz's imagination getting the best of her? When everyone around her is convinced she's become unhinged, she must prove, if only to herself, that a woman's intuition expands beyond a single cryptic text.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Sullivan's diverting debut, a novel of domestic suspense, sleep-deprived novelist and newish mom Liz Bennett knows she should cut herself some slack—about lingering baby weight, less than Kardashian-level grooming, in fact the whole Pandora's box of perennial self-doubts—while adjusting to the recent tectonic shifts in her life. Then she accidentally sees a flirty-sounding text on husband Arno's phone from one of his hedge fund coworkers, sending her into high infidelity alert. And once subsequent social media sleuthing reveals the sender of the text to be Vivienne Wood, a gorgeous Harvard Business School MBA, Liz, whose sardonic narration may be the book's greatest charm, starts to channel her considerable creativity into what approaches full-on stalking. Admittedly prone to what her therapist labels "catastrophizing," Liz habitually puts the most damning spin on any hint the dashing Arno might indeed be straying while discounting evidence of his love, such as convincing her to agree to a nanny so that she can focus on her second novel. Though the twisty, if at times leisurely, plot may disappoint thriller fans expecting someone to turn up dead, the more romance-inclined should find this just their cup of chai.
