Abigail Dean

Isabel and Edward meet as teenagers, fall deeply in love, move to London together, build a life full of friends and work and ordinary happiness. They are thirty years old and entirely themselves when a man breaks into their South London home on a spring evening. He forces Edward to tie Isabel up, drags Edward to another room, and assaults Isabel. They both survive. Later victims of the same man — who comes to be known as the South London Invader — will not be so lucky. His crimes show more escalate over the following years from assault to rape to murder, a reign of terror that lasts decades before he's finally caught through a fluke DNA match when a relative submits to a family tree website. The man is Nigel Wood, a retired police officer.
Twenty-five years after the attack, Isabel and Edward — now divorced and in their fifties — are called back to London to deliver victim impact statements at Wood's sentencing. The novel alternates between Edward's present-day perspective as they wait together in the courthouse, and Isabel's past-tense account of the full arc of their relationship — from how they met through the attack and through the long, grinding dissolution of a marriage that trauma had quietly destroyed. Edward was locked in another room. He survived physically untouched. And neither of them ever found a way to talk about what that meant for either of them, or for what they were to each other. Inspired by the Golden State Killer case, and Dean's own longstanding fear of home invasion.

[May contain spoilers]
Edward's inability to discuss the night — what was done to Isabel, what was done to him, what it cost him to be powerless — is the core wound in the marriage. Isabel eventually goes public as a victim, which helps bring Wood to justice and finds her voice as a writer, but Edward is ferociously private and experiences her choice as a further violation of something that belonged to both of them. The courtroom chapters are intercut with a subplot about a young woman who is the orphaned daughter of one of Wood's murder victims, which adds texture and a different angle on what the Invader's crimes actually destroyed. The ending brings some qualified, hard-won hope to Isabel and Edward's story — not a tidy resolution, but the right one.
What I think: This is exactly your kind of book — devastating emotional honesty, trauma that doesn't resolve cleanly, a marriage examined with unflinching precision, dual perspectives that each illuminate what the other can't see. The South London setting gives it a sharp British atmospheric quality. It's literary crime rather than thriller — less about the case and entirely about the wreckage. Based on your taste this feels like a strong 4 to 4.5. show less

The Death of Us is a literary thriller but it's also the anatomy of a relationship. Isabel and Edward's love story is blown apart by a shocking and terrible attack. This book takes us from their first meeting and their life together before the events of that horrific night, through the aftermath and beyond to the current day.

This is not a fast-paced read and, notwithstanding the fact that I'm particularly slow at the moment, it took me quite a while to read it. I was dreading the moment when show more the night of the attack occurred but by then I was somewhat desensitised to it because I knew it was going to happen right from the beginning. It didn't make it any the less appalling and I still avoided reading that section before bed but it highlighted to me that this is not a book about an act of extreme violence and degradation, rather it's one of love, survival and what happens to a couple when they must deal with the long-lasting consequences of that act.

Abigail Dean's writing is emotive and full of depth. This is a disturbing and devastating character-driven read with two protagonists that I found relatable and well-drawn. The Death of Us is intelligent, thought-provoking and hard-hitting. show less

Inspired by the real life case of the Turpin family, this novel tells the story of Lex, a successful lawyer who is called back to England when her mother dies, leaving a house and a small inheritance to divide among the surviving children. Her younger sister conceives of the idea of turning the house into a community center, but they need the rest of the siblings to sign off on the project, so Lex visits each in turn, which awakens her memories of what happened in that terrible house.

This show more novel was a lot stronger than I had expected, given that this is Dean's debut novel. It's well-paced and with nuanced characterizations of all the various family members, even the parents, who are guilty of egregious abuse. And Lex at first appears like a woman who has it all together, which turns out later to be true. This is a family where the surviving siblings are not okay and there are good reasons for that. I'm looking forward to seeing what this author does next. show less

Isabel and Edward are an affluent young couple living in Camberwell Grove then their lives are ripped apart. The South London Invader attacks them one night, Isabel assaulted and Edward powerless to help. The police have DNA but no match and the perpetrator goes on to kill nine other people. Twenty years later and a man had been caught and confessed, the victims are invited to court to give their statements prior to sentencing. For Isabel and Edward a chance to reconnect.
This book is show more absolutely brilliant! I can't really praise it highly enough. As a story about the love between two people it is kind and honest, as a crime novel it is intricately plotted and as a psychological novel it is tense and not sensational. That idea of a lack of sensationalism is something that Dean does incredibly well, her previous novel (day One) and this take events that are horrific but they are not detailed, they are alluded to, they are skimmed over, there are a few dispassionate details given but they are not the focus. Here, the aftermath and the years of suffering are the focus and it is a generous, coruscating and balanced story. show less