A Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year 'Does art enhance
life, or negate it? The painful question runs through Lowry's
portrait of Thomas Hardy, and produces a sombre, delicate novel,
finely judged and full of insight' Hilary Mantel One Wednesday
morning in November 1912 the ageing Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper
and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her
dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in
his arms, she has gone. The day before, he and Emma had exchanged
bitter words - leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and
wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence
Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a
relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set
free. But he is left shattered by the loss. Hardy's bewilderment
only increases when, sorting through Emma's effects, he comes
across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life
together, ominously titled 'What I Think of My Husband'. He
discovers what Emma had truly felt - that he had been cold, remote
and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her
childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever
marry? He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in
which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to
re-evaluate himself, and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when
they first met. Hardy's pained reflections on the choices he has
made, and must now make, form a unique combination of love story
and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. The
Chosen - the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry -
hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife;
memory and regret; life and art.
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