A Sleeper Success Defines Novelist’s Debut and Legacy The Novel ‘Silent Wife’ Benefits From Success of ‘Gone Girl’ By JULIE BOSMAN The blockbuster novel of last summer was “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn, a dark, psychological thriller about a broken marriage, told by warring spouses in alternating chapters. This summer, there is “The Silent Wife” by A. S. A. Harrison, a sleeper hit that happens to answer to the same description. But “The Silent Wife” has a striking story behind its publication that makes it an unlikely best seller: In a season that has been dominated by brand-name authors — Khaled Hosseini, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling — Ms. Harrison was a Toronto writer and an unknown, who had never published a novel before. Her book was released as a paperback original, not a hardcover, which is the preferred, more expensive format chosen when a publisher wants a book to make a big splash. And in a real-life tragic twist, Ms. Harrison died of cancer in April, only weeks before her book was published. She was 65. The book, a slim 326-page story about a well-off Chicago couple whose 20-year union crumbles and veers into cheating, duplicity and violence, will make its debut on The New York Times’s combined print and e-book best-seller list next week at No. 11. Kathryn Court, the publisher of Penguin Books, said that an editor, Tara Singh, had acquired “The Silent Wife” in the spring of 2012, months before “Gone Girl” hurtled onto hardcover best-seller lists, where it has remained for more than a year. Timing can be everything in publishing, and every now and then, a book comes along that dovetails perfectly to capture some of the excitement stirred up by a similar title. “We bought the book and loved it,” Ms. Court said. “Then the ‘Gone Girl’ thing happened. It was like throwing a can of petrol on the bonfire.” Last year, the heavy-breathing novels “Bared to You” and “Entwined With You,” both by Sylvia Day, were marketed as natural follow-ups to the hugely best-selling “Fifty Shades” series, which left readers hungry for more erotica. After many readers sped through “Gone Girl,” with its prickly story of a marriage gone awry, they wanted something else like it. Ian Kern, manager of the Mysterious Bookshop in TriBeCa, said the similarity of Ms. Harrison’s book was “a huge selling point” and that he has prominently displayed “The Silent Wife” on the front table. “Even if the publisher is wrong that it’s the next ‘Gone Girl,’ ” he said, “I’ll still pay pretty close attention when I see that tag line.” “The Silent Wife,” published in late June, picked up momentum when it received crucial attention from a handful of reviewers. Laura Miller, the influential book critic for Salon, called the book “utterly absorbing” in a review in May. “The secret of this novel’s spell lies not in ingenious twists but in its meticulous plausibility,” she wrote. Writing in The New Republic, Sarah Weinman noted that “each alternating chapter adds escalating character revelation, fitting since ‘The Silent Wife’ presents a long-term coupling that seems unimpeachable on the outside but is slowly rotting from within.” Retailers noticed the book a little belatedly: Target has been selling the book for about 10 days, and Walmart has just put in its order. During the week of July 22, more than 20,000 e-books were sold, and total sales are increasing between 30 and 60 percent each week, said Patrick Nolan, editor in chief of Penguin Books, which has gone back to press seven times, printing a total of 144,000 copies. “It’s a word-of-mouth book,” Mr. Nolan said. “This is one of those things that started more slowly but now is growing and growing.” Sara Nelson, editorial director for books and Kindle at Amazon, said that other than “Fifty Shades,” few books released in this format sell so strongly. “I can’t think of the last paperback original that jumped like this one has,” she said, adding that it was selling even more strongly in e-book than in print. It also may have helped that Ms. Harrison’s book bears the word “wife” in the title, an element that appears to send a signal to female readers. (See “The Paris Wife” by Paula McLain, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger and “American Wife” by Curtis Sittenfeld.) Samantha Haywood, Ms. Harrison’s literary agent in Canada, said that Ms. Harrison spent much of her career working as an editor and writing nonfiction under the name Susan Harrison. Until “The Silent Wife,” Ms. Harrison’s attempts at fiction had sputtered out. She wrote two novels that Ms. Haywood described as “cozy mysteries,” but they never sold to a publisher. Then Ms. Harrison had the idea for “The Silent Wife,” with its concept of his-and-hers narratives. “She was lit on fire with excitement,” Ms. Haywood said. “It was quite fully realized as an idea.” (Kimberly Witherspoon of InkWell Management in New York brokered the deal with Penguin.) At the time of Ms. Harrison’s death, she had read early, sparkling reviews of her novel and had a sense that it could be a success, said her husband, John Massey, a visual artist. “She was very modest, and I think she knew that she had worked extremely hard on that book,” Mr. Massey said. “She had very clear ideas about what was good. And I think she believed she had written a good novel.”
Posted on: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 04:54:18 +0000
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