“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.

In the novel, a famous painter, Alicia Berenson, fatally shoots her successful fashion photographer husband in the face one evening and stops speaking.

The silent patient review