Published by Celadon Books on February 5, 2019, The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides opens with a crime so stark that it seems to explain itself: Alicia Berenson, a celebrated painter, shoots her husband and thereafter refuses to speak a single word.

Yet silence does not close the case; it transforms it. Alicia becomes an object of public fascination, a figure onto whom strangers project theories, sympathy and suspicion. Years later, criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber arrives with the conviction that he can do what others have failed to do: reach Alicia, recover her voice and learn the motive hidden behind it.

The Seduction of an Answer

Theo’s interest soon exceeds professional duty. In Alicia’s silence he discovers a challenge that begins to consume him, leading him into the history of her marriage, her art and the unanswered questions surrounding the night of the murder.

Michaelides constructs the novel with the discipline of a locked room and the unease of a confession withheld. Every disclosure promises clarity; each one also alters the shape of what the reader thinks has already been understood.

A Thriller of Perception and Obsession

The Silent Patient draws its suspense from more than the search for motive. It asks why people require explanations from others, what they are willing to overlook in pursuit of those explanations, and how easily the role of observer can become implicated in the story being observed.

Taut, atmospheric and psychologically charged, Michaelides’s debut is a novel in which the most alarming statement may be the one never spoken aloud.

About the Book

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is a psychological thriller following Alicia Berenson, a painter who becomes silent after the murder of her husband, and Theo Faber, the therapist determined to discover what her silence conceals.

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