Blog Tour: ‘The Affair’ by Hilary Boyd

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘The Affair’ by Hilary Boyd.

Thanks to Sarah Harwood and Penguin Random House for my copy of the book and invitation to join the blog tour. This hasn’t influenced my review at all – opinions are entirely my own, as usual!

I expected this book to be a psychological thriller…lots of lies and deception, twists and turns, tense and sinister events. You know the score.

It absolutely isn’t that at all.

Instead, I found myself reading the portrait of a struggling marriage. Connie and Devan have been married a long time but are no longer in sync. He has retired from a busy medical job and doesn’t know what to do with retirement. She loves her job – travelling with groups on train tours on the Continent – and doesn’t want to be pressured to join Devan so they can face old age together.

With an increasingly petulant husband at home, Connie throws herself into her work. It is during one of her trips abroad that she meets Jared and a tentative affair begins. However, Jared is unwilling to leave their fledgling relationship in Italy and instead begins to turn up wherever Connie goes. As Connie tries to extricate herself from her unwise fling, the stakes are raised and her marriage is put in danger.

It all sounds very thrillery, but my overwhelming impression was of a closely written human drama. Boyd cleverly sets the scene so that different points of view can be seen and empathised with – we, as readers, know why Connie wants escape, but we also know why Devan feels the frustration he does. The human dimension is never lost from this novel – it really does feel like watching real people navigate a tricky problem that can only hurt them and those they love.

I can see why this would make a great beach read – I was caught up in the story and characters and raced through the book so that I could find out what happened to Connie. The settings of Connie’s tours are often glorious and the opportunity for armchair travel was welcome in this year of the staycation.

As Jared gets closer to Connie, there is an escalation of tension, but this is not in a typical psychological-thriller way. Instead, the reader navigates some awkward social situations with Connie and waits with bated breath to see who are going to be the victims in the fallout of this ill-advised affair.

I’ll admit that this book isn’t at all what I expected, but I did enjoy it a lot. It felt like an intimate portrait of a marriage in crisis with believable characters and sustained by a sense that things can only go wrong – but how?

I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoys intelligent fiction based around realistic central characters. Boyd cleverly manipulates readers’ sympathies and there are some surprises along the way. I really didn’t know how I wanted the book to end – as with real life, there was no simple answer. However, this was an ultimately satisfying read.