The Younger Wife

Stephen Aston is a respected heart surgeon, admired across Melbourne for his steady hands and easy charm. He is also about to be married again — to Heather, an interior designer young enough to be his daughter. There is only one obstacle: Stephen is still legally wed to Pam, the mother of his two grown daughters, who now lives in a memory-care facility and can no longer speak for herself.

To Tully and Rachel Aston, their father's engagement lands like an insult. Heather is younger than both of them, and her sudden place at the centre of the family feels less like love than like a takeover. As the sisters close ranks, each is quietly unravelling in her own way — Tully beneath a marriage and a compulsion she can't control, Rachel behind the composure of a successful bakery and a secret she has carried since she was a teenager. Heather, meanwhile, has a past of her own that she has worked hard to keep buried.

Told in rotating perspectives and shadowed by a wedding-day scene splashed with blood, The Younger Wife peels back the polished surface of an affluent family to ask who is really being protected, and from what. Sally Hepworth turns the familiar suspicion of the "gold-digging" second wife into a sharper, more unsettling story about coercive control, the versions of ourselves we perform for others, and the cost of finally telling the truth.