The Pilot's WifeRecommendations

Anita Shreve's hauntingly beautiful #1 bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection about tragedy, sorrow, treachery, and the "impossibility of knowing another person" is about tragedy, grief, betrayal, and the "impossibility of knowing another person."

Kathryn has grown accustomed to both extreme thrill and lengthy periods of solitude as the wife of a pilot, but nothing could have prepared her for a late-night knock informing her that her husband had perished in a plane crash. Kathryn Lyons' life has been peaceful if unremarkable up to this point: a fulfilling job teaching high school in the New England mill town where she grew up; a picture-perfect home by the sea; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time.

As Kathryn deals with her loss, she becomes engulfed in a whirlpool of publicity sparked by the modern need for tragedy's specifics. Even before the jet is found in waters off the coast of Ireland, her husband's life is being scrutinized, and a strange personal mystery emerges. Is it possible that the increasingly frightening reports that he had a hidden life are true?