And it was completely a slush pile submission!”Ĭopeland sent the manuscript out to U.K. This is the fastest I have ever read, met with, and signed an author. on Saturday, called Alex that same day, met him the following Monday, and signed him up. “It’s not often that something hits you like a sledgehammer. Copeland, director at Rogers Coleridge & White in London (and also a published children’s book author), says it was right after Frankfurt, when, “at Friday lunch, I took a peek at my inbox, just poked my nose in, saw Alex’s email, and started reading.”Ĭopeland says his excitement soon turned to dread when he thought of other agents reading it and realized that he might not be able to get it. The manuscript arrived in agent Sam Copeland’s email in October 2017. That, combined with graduate work in psychiatry and volunteering at Northgate, a psychiatric facility in England (“I thought it would be a great location for a murder mystery,” he says), led him to his story, in which Alicia’s silence and the motivation for her crime become the obsession of criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber. “The idea of her death and resurrection fascinated me,” he adds. Michaelides says he read the tragedy of Alcestis when he was 13, and the play haunted him. I can tell you now: myth was in the air there as well. I met Michaelides in New York in October at the rooftop launch party for Celadon, Macmillan’s brand new imprint-right before, coincidentally, I was leaving for a writers residency on the Greek island of Rhodes. “Myth was everywhere-it was in the very air,” he says. Michaelides grew up with a Greek Cypriot father and an English mother on Cyprus, where, he tells me, the Greek tragedies were always being performed. Rescued from Hades by Hercules, she’s brought back to life but remains silent. The story was inspired by Alcestis, one of Euripides’s plays, in which the woman of the title agrees to die to save her husband. A very clever book - highly recommended.In the novel, a famous painter, Alicia Berenson, fatally shoots her successful fashion photographer husband in the face one evening and stops speaking. I have never been so happily wrong-footed. "I was kicking myself black and blue that I did not see *that* moment coming. The twist comes as hard and fast as a slap across the face." - John Marrs Masterfully plotted and brilliantly paced by a writer at the top of his game." - Cara Hunter "One of the best thrillers I've read this year. "An excellent, slow-burning psychological thriller sharp, clever and with a whammy that genuinely took me by surprise (it takes a lot to do this). I read it in a state of intense, breathless excitement and never saw the ending coming.
I told myself I'd just dip in eleven hours later - it's now 5.47 AM - I've finished it, absolutely dazzled." - A J Finn
This extraordinary novel set my blood fizzing - I quite literally couldn't put it down. The Silent Patient is a swarming, paranoid nightmare of a novel with an ending that is destined to go down as one of the most shocking, mind-blowing twists in recent memory." - Blake Crouch "Alex Michaelides has written one of the best psychological thrillers I have ever read.
"Smart, sophisticated suspense - a very fine novel by any standard." - Lee Child "Genuinely chilling and with a real sucker punch of a twist." - Sharon Bolton The pages will burn with the friction from your hands turning them." - David Baldacci I read it in two nights and savored every luscious word, every grim encounter, every startling twist. Michaelides has crafted a totally original, spellbinding psychological mystery so quirky, so unique that it should have its own genre. "The Silent Patient sneaks up on you like a slash of intimidating shadow on a badly lit street.