‘Hardy’s doomed first marriage is the subject of this beautifully rendered and poignant novel… The prose is exquisite… Above all, like many of the best novelists, Lowry understands the intricacies of the human heart’ – The Times
‘The Chosen combines psychological depth with prose of mesmerising beauty… This is a novel of tremendous range, from the elegiac to the humorous to the sublime.’ – The Financial Times
‘Slowly and feelingly, the novel pores over questions about the costs of art, refusing to shout out answers, letting many perspectives tell upon each other’ – The Guardian
‘Both a fascinating analysis of Hardy and a powerful and exquisite work of art in its own right… her writing is utterly without mercy while also being underpinned by deep compassion… her novel is glorious – the best that I have read in several years’ – Literary Review
One Wednesday morning in November 1912 the ageing Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she has gone.
The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words – leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by this loss.
Hardy’s bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma’s effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled ‘What I Think of My Husband’. He discovers what Emma had truly felt – that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever marry?
A unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true, The Chosen hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret; life and art.