#BookReview ‘The Therapist’ by Helene Flood trans by Alison McCullough

About the book…

From the mind of a psychologist comes a chilling domestic thriller that gets under your skin.

**One of Cosmopolitan’s 25 of the best books to read this summer 2021**

“A wonderful storyteller“ Chris Whitaker

“Creepy, compelling and very well written” Harriet Tyce

“Wonderfully creepy, twisty and compelling” Karen Hamilton

“Masterfully paced and hauntingly written” Anna Bailey

“Gets under your skin” Jo Spain

“I couldn’t put it down” Sarah Ward

At first it’s the lie that hurts.

A voicemail from her husband tells Sara he’s arrived at the holiday cabin. Then a call from his friend confirms he never did.

She tries to carry on as normal, teasing out her clients’ deepest fears, but as the hours stretch out, her own begin to surface. And when the police finally take an interest, they want to know why Sara deleted that voicemail.

To get to the root of Sigurd’s disappearance, Sara must question everything she knows about her relationship.

Could the truth about what happened be inside her head?

My thanks to Milly Reid from Quercus Books, for asking if I would join the blogtour for the rather excellent, and creepy, ‘The Therapist’,which is published by Maclehose on 8th July in hardcover.

”The most important thing you can do for your neurotic patients is this:help them to see the world as it is .Not the way they want it to be, or the way they fear it will be. Not the way the conclusions they have drawn tell them it is. As it is.”

Having moved, with her husband Sigurd into his grandfather’s house, and simultaneously establishing a practice from the flat above her garage, Sara is suddenly left alone and quite unmoored.

Their house is being renovated, a state reflected in the current state of their marriage. Sigurd, an architect, takes on more work as Sara’s is much more unreliable than they anticipated. A regular flow of patients to her psychologist couch is yet to appear, for the moment, she has 3 regulars and a fourth semi-regular clients. These are Vera, Christoffer, and Trygve, with appearances by Sasha. They are, respectively, a young woman who feels alienated, a young boy whose mother is overly concerned that he is a goth/emo follower, and a man with a gambling addiction. Sasha is a 16 year old male to female transwoman who visits Sara to, as she puts it, ‘clear her head’.

Against this background, their house remains in a semi-permanent state of stasis, not unlike their marriage, as Sigurd works too much to renovate and Sara too little to pay for any changes. It is a neat reflection on their fragile relationship-whilst they appear deeply committed to their future together, there are reasons why one has cause to mistrust the other.

Having planned a weekend with his friends, Sigurd leaves to go camping, leaving Sara a voicemail which claims he is there, at the meeting point with his friend, Jan. Not particularly worrying about this, Sara carries on with her day, treating her patients and filling in their backstory for us, the readers. When Jan rings to see why Sigurd never arrived at the meeting point, prickles of worry begin to traverse their way up Sara’s spine…

The police, initially seeming disinterested in a grown man who has been missing for a relatively short period of time, begin to look more closely at Sara as her behaviour becomes more erratic. Things in the house are moved around, items disappear and others reappear, and then there is the night after the police call, when Sara is convinced that someone has broken into her home..

As the tension mounts, you, the reader, have to decide whether or not you buy into her reliability as a narrator. Sara’s constant need to clarify and count in order to control the narratives around her are reflected by the devastating death of her mother from early onset Alzheimers. It could be fear of the same thing happening to her that creates these control mechanisms, or, simply, a trauma response to this loss, it is for each individual to start working through what Sara’s memories represent, and , what is the truth about Sigurd’s mountain trip.

It is a very clever, entwining novel which I found difficult to stop reading once I had started. I wanted to know the secrets of this tightly wound woman, gain resolution in the way that she is treating her patients, and, most of all, find out what happened to Sigurd. The masterful translation creates a real sense of place and character, you feel as if you are inside Sara’s head, analysing her as she analyses the others in her life. Highly recommended.

About the author…

Helene Flood is a psychologist who obtained her doctoral degree on violence, revictimization and trauma-related shame and guilt in 2016.

She now works as a psychologist and researcher at the National Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress.

She lives in Oslo with her husband and two children. The Therapist is her first adult novel.

About the translator…

Alison McCullough is a Norwegian to English translator and writer based in Stavanger, Norway. Originally from a small mining community in the north of England, she holds a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and an MA in Film Studies from University College London.

Link-https://alisonmccullough.com/

Twitter @alimccwriter @QuercusBooks @maclehosepress