The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

The Silent Patient is one of those novels that you don’t quite understand until the last twist. It begins as a story of a young woman who has committed a murder that was seemingly unforeseeable. The victim? Her husband, a husband that she so dearly adored. This adoration is apparent as she writes about it in her diary many times. So why did she do it? No one knows as she becomes silent after the crime and refuses to speak or react for the next 5 years. That is until she meets Theo.

Written in a format that goes back and forth between Theo’s POV and Alicia’s diary, The Silent Patient is an interesting read with a shocking twist at the end. Alicia, a talented painter, has refused to speak for over 5 years after murdering her husband. Although found guilty of the crime she had committed, there was never any understanding of why she had done it or why she never spoke after the event. Alicia’s existence has been confined to the Grove, an asylum, as the court has deemed her mentally unwell as a result of the uncovering of her mentally ill past. Theo on the other hand is a psychotherapist, who decidedly has been interested in Alicia for a while. As a result of this interest, when a position opens up at the Grove he immediately takes it, even though there is talk of the asylum looking to be shut down. Theo is convinced that he is the one who will make Alicia speak.

This is where the story begins to unravel. Theo’s character is a complex one. Although he is a psychotherapist, he deals with his own demons. The demons from his abusive childhood at the hands of his father. His obsession with Alicia is also strange, trance-like, and as if he believes he is the only person in the world who can make her speak.

Alicia, on the other hand, writes in her diary about her day-to-day life leading up to the murder at the suggestion of her husband to help her cope with her mental state. She talks about her love for her husband, meetings with people, and more eerily, a man who is watching her.

Both Theo and Alicia are battling their pasts, their fears and their lack of self-assurance as Theo confronts the reality that his wife is cheating on him and Alicia feels the desperation spilling over as no one believes her about the man following her. As the two characters collide, a new reality emerges, uncovering the secrets of the past.

Well-paced, well-written with a shocking ending, Alex Michaelides spares nothing in his debut novel as he reveals the human experience in this engrossing psychological thriller.

Written by Zainab Qureshi