About the Book

ALICIA
Alicia Berenson writes a diary as a release, an outlet – and to prove to her beloved husband that everything is fine. She can’t bear the thought of worrying Gabriel, or causing him pain.

Until, late one evening, Alicia shoots Gabriel five times and then never speaks another word.

THEO
Forensic psychotherapist Theo Faber is convinced he can successfully treat Alicia, where all others have failed. Obsessed with investigating her crime, his discoveries suggest Alicia’s silence goes far deeper than he first thought.

And if she speaks, would he want to hear the truth?

 

My Thoughts

The Silent Patient is about Alicia who, seemingly out of nowhere, murders her husband, Gabriel. Before the murder they seemed like the perfect couple: she a successful artist and he a successful photographer. Now Gabriel is dead and Alicia is rendered mute, she’s held in a secure psychiatric unit and no one has been able to get through to her. The novel is narrated by Theo, a psychotherapist, who becomes convinced that he can treat Alicia and get her talking again.

The Silent Patient has been calling to me from my TBR ever since I was sent an ARC last year and I finally picked it up yesterday afternoon. I literally read it non-stop as it grabbed me from the opening chapter and kept me gripped right until the very end! Even after I finished reading I was still thinking about it!

This is a novel that is predominantly told from Theo’s perspective but it’s interspersed with Alicia’s journal entries. It’s a great way of telling this story as we find out more about Theo and then about Alicia, and you can see how he becomes fixated on helping her, you see that there are similarities between them. Theo speaks to a handful of people who knew Alicia before the murder and he begins to build up a picture of the person she was, and it gets you thinking about whether she really could have killed her husband and you also wonder about the why. Then you get Alicia’s perspective through her diary entries which has you second guessing what you’d previously thought.

I loved the different ways silence was looked at in this book – Alicia was literally silent in this novel but we see other ways in which people are sidelined in their own lives, who hide their history and who keep their pain locked away. There are many ways to be silenced and many ways of showing you are silenced and this runs through this novel. So many of us have things in our lives that we can’t or won’t talk about, and you see this all through The Silent Patient. If only people talked more then maybe damage wouldn’t be wrought upon damage throughout the years. But then it also made me think of how sometimes silence is the only thing left to someone who had been made a victim; how a person can find strength in their refusal to give others what they want – their story, their voice.

The Silent Patient kept me on my toes all the way through. Initially my brain was ticking away trying to work out what was going on as I was reading (and I had about four or five different theories but none of them quite fit) but I ended up so completely engrossed in the story that I was utterly stunned when the reveal happens! It’s not often that a novel grabs me to that degree and shocks me as much as this one so it deserves all of the praise!

There’s not a lot more I can say about The Silent Patient because it’s a book best read without knowing too much about it. I honestly can’t praise it highly enough though – it’s the perfect psychological thriller and I definitely recommend that you pre-order a copy now!

The Silent Patient is very clever, utterly twisted and downright brilliant!

 

Many thanks to Poppy at Orion for my copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

The Silent Patient is due to be published on 7th February in hardback and ebook and can be pre-ordered here.