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Sally Hepworth
Sally Hepworth is the author of Mad Mabel. Readers looking for her work will find her distinctive voice in this book. It's a good place to start if you're new to her writing.
The Soulmate
Gabe and Pippa Gerard have found their dream home: a cottage perched on a cliff above the sea, in a quiet coastal town where they can raise their two young daughters far from the noise of their old life. But their clifftop has a darker reputation. Its edge has become a place people come to end their lives — and Gabe, calm and persuasive, has a gift for talking them back from it. Time after time he walks out into the dark and brings someone home safe.
Until the night he doesn't. Pippa watches from the window as her husband stands at the edge with a woman, his hands raised — and moments later the woman is gone. In the aftermath, a single fact unsettles everything Pippa thought she knew: Gabe had met the dead woman before. As the police begin asking questions and the story of that night refuses to settle, the smooth surface of a seemingly happy marriage starts to crack.
Told across two timelines and by two very different narrators, The Soulmate is a taut domestic-suspense novel about the person you choose to build a life with — and how much of them you can ever really know. Sally Hepworth turns a marriage inside out, asking what we forgive in the people we love, and what we would do to protect them.
The present-day narrator, a wife and mother who begins to doubt her husband after a woman dies at the cliff by their home.
Pippa's husband, a charismatic local who talks people down from the cliff and lives with bipolar disorder.