What She Left

November 16, 2015
Emails, texts, tweets, letters, and the like—all related to the death of Alice Salmon, a 25-year-old up-and-coming British writer—make up this confusing thriller from the pseudonymous Richmond, a London journalist. Alice’s body is found in a river in her former university’s town of Southampton. Did she accidentally drown after a wild night of drinking? Commit suicide? Or was she murdered? Her former anthropology professor, Jeremy Cooke, decides to publish a book that recreates her life through all the musings of Alice and her friends and family that the Internet can supply. These dispatches are slow going: both because they’re full of unnatural conversations between Cooke and Alice’s acquaintances, and because the online contemplations appear in random order. Readers must continually go back to check the dates of postings by Alice, boyfriend Luke Addison, best friend Megan Parker, and Alice’s mum to figure out who did what when. In the end, the truth of Alice’s demise arrives out of nowhere. Agent: Kate Burton, Penguin U.K.