The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

 

"Her silence was like a mirror - reflecting yourself back at you.

And it was often an ugly site."

This is the story of Alicia Berenson who has everything in life - a desirable career as an artist, a perfect husband who is a celebrated fashion photographer, and a beautiful house overlooking a park in an expensive area of London. Everything seems picture perfect until one evening when her husband Gabriel returns home from work, she shoots him to death, five times in the face, and goes silent. Even during the trials in the court, she does not utter a word, no justifications, no explanations, nothing.

Alicia's enduring silence turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, an enigma that captures the public's attention and casts Alicia into notoriety. She's thus whisked away from the media glare and lodged in The Grove, a high security criminal psychiatric facility in North London. Here she becomes the 'Silent Patient'. 

In comes forensic psychotherapist Theo Faber, who is determined to break through her silence and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband. His determination leads him down to a twisting path into his own motivations, a search for the truth that threatens to consume him.

And thus begins the suspenseful saga, it is not a story that traces the journey of the protagonist from point A to B, but rather a mind gripping tale which traverses from minds of the both - the women convicted of killing her husband and the therapist who's determined to treat her. 

While unraveling the mystery around Alicia, the story also focuses on the personal life of Theo and many of his secrets.  The book makes us realize how powerful a weapon Silence is. 

Alicia whose now a blank canvas, owing to her Silence, forces us, readers, to draw our own conclusion's about her from the journal she keeps and what other characters in the story have to say about her. 

Of course, till the end, when she actually opens up... 

Or does she...

A tale where 'Only she knows what happened' and 'Only he can make her speak.'

- Nidhi Shetty