Chosen

Anne and Gabi's Review

Gabi - Elizabeth Lowry investigates an opportune window to direct our gaze upon another literary giant. This time Thomas Hardy, in a counterpointed perspective around the death of his wife Emma via attendant family and familiars, notably his lover. Emma's legendary torched diaries are the device that calls forth the questions in this fleshed out past and provide a wonderful speculative link to some of his seminal works. 

Anne Day - An in-depth insight into the life of Thomas Hardy -  Absolutely fascinating. I loved it.

Publishers Review

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 re-imagine 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.

Notable Reviews

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