Book Review – The Silent Patient

Hiii everyone! How’s it going?

I started a book club last month and I couldn’t have picked a better book to kick start this journey. I read this book and honestly couldn’t even process what I had just read for a couple of days. I had to review it.

I’ll try to keep this short and cute.

Book Title – The Silent Patient

Author: Alex Michaelides

Pages: 323

Published on the 5th of February 2019 by Celadon books.

ISBN : 1250301696 (ISBN13: 9781250301697)

Blurb:

” Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word. Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London. Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him….”

I first came across this book on goodreads last year and I immediately clicked ‘want to read’ and forgot it there. However, I never read it until I decided I wanted it to be the BOTM for my book club and found out it won the goodreads best mystery/thriller of the year.

What the book is pretty much about –

Set in London, England. Alex tells us a story of love, loss, betrayal, trauma and its effects. Narrated by Theo the psychotherapist, the story alternates between the past and the present with her journal excerpts in between. It took a while to differentiate the past from the present at some point but i guess it was all part of the author’s plan to fuck with our minds.

My opinion: I love this book and all the plot twists. It was so fast paced, most of my bookclub members read it in less than a week. I am good at predicting book endings but i sure did not see this one coming. You know a book is good when you find yourself playing detective trying to figure things out and Alex Michaelides did a good job keeping us guessing who Gabriel’s killer might be. I found the characters really interesting and I like how the focus was on Alicia and Theo but then we know the other characters well enough to have a formed opinion about them. It was a bit weird though that Alicia was updating her diary real time, someone broke into her house at some point and she was writing all about it while it was happening, that was very unrealistic… I mean, who has the time to update their diary when an intruder is in their house?

This is a solid debut novel IMO. You can tell the author did his homework as he apparently wrote this while he did a post graduate course in psychotherapy. If you’re into books that generally leave you mind-fucked, then this is a good one for you. It’s obvious I 100% recommend. I rated this 5 STARS!

FUN FACT – Did you know that Plan B Entertainment holdings and Annapurna are developing the silent patient as a movie?

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