A short life of the author
Anita Shreve (6 October 1946 – 29 March 2018) was an American novelist who published seventeen novels between 1989 and 2017, nearly all set along the New England coast, exploring love, betrayal, and catastrophe with a spare, emotionally precise prose style. Her most commercially successful novel, The Pilot’s Wife (1998), was an Oprah’s Book Club selection that sold over two million copies and established Shreve as one of the most widely read literary fiction writers in America.
Life
Shreve was born in Dedham, Massachusetts, and educated at Tufts University. She worked as a journalist for Newsweek, US, and other magazines, and lived in Nairobi, Kenya, for several years, writing about women in developing countries. She returned to New England and settled on the coast — Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and later a farm in New Hampshire — and the New England seacoast became the dominant landscape of her fiction.
She published her first novel, Eden Close, in 1989 at forty-three, relatively late for a first novelist. Over the next three decades she published at a steady pace — roughly one novel every two years — maintaining a large and loyal readership throughout.
The Pilot’s Wife (1998)
Shreve’s most successful novel. Kathryn Lyons, the wife of a commercial airline pilot, is awakened in the middle of the night by a union official who tells her that her husband’s plane has crashed, killing everyone aboard. As the investigation unfolds, Kathryn discovers that her husband had been leading a double life — a second wife, a second family, a second identity in London. The novel follows Kathryn’s attempt to reconcile the man she thought she knew with the man he actually was.
The novel’s power lies in its controlled revelation of secrets. Shreve structures the plot as a series of discoveries, each one redefining everything that came before. The New England coastal setting — a cottage on the shore, winter storms, the grey Atlantic — mirrors Kathryn’s emotional desolation. Oprah Winfrey selected it for her Book Club in 1999, and the resulting sales made Shreve a household name.
The Weight of Water (1997)
Shreve’s most critically admired novel. It interweaves two narratives: a modern journalist travelling to the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire to investigate a notorious 1873 double murder, and the story of the murders themselves, narrated by the immigrant woman who survived them. The past narrative, based on the real Smuttynose Island murders, is the stronger — a vivid, claustrophobic account of isolation, jealousy, and violence in a tiny fishing community.
The dual structure allows Shreve to explore how the past haunts the present, a theme that runs through her entire body of work. The novel was adapted into a 2000 film starring Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley.
The Last Time They Met (2001)
Shreve’s most formally ambitious novel. It tells the story of two writers who loved each other in their youth, divided into three sections that move backwards in time — from their sixties, to their twenties in Africa, to their teens in New England. The reverse chronology creates a reading experience in which revelations about the past arrive with increasing force, culminating in a final twist that recontextualises everything.
Fortune’s Rocks (1999) and Sea Glass (2002)
These two novels are set in the same fictional New Hampshire beach community in different eras. Fortune’s Rocks (1899) follows a fifteen-year-old girl’s affair with a married man and its devastating consequences. Sea Glass (1929) follows a young couple during the Great Depression and a bitter mill strike. Together with The Pilot’s Wife and The Weight of Water, they form a loose quartet exploring the New England coast across a century.
Other Notable Works
- Strange Fits of Passion (1991) — a journalist investigates the story of a woman who fled an abusive marriage to a remote Maine village. Shreve’s second novel and her first to attract significant attention
- Resistance (1995) — a Belgian woman shelters a downed American pilot during the German occupation. Shreve’s only novel set outside America
- Light on Snow (2004) — a father and daughter discover an abandoned newborn in the snow
- Body Surfing (2007) — a young widow tutoring at a New Hampshire beach house becomes entangled with two brothers
Critical Standing
Shreve occupied the space between literary fiction and popular fiction — a territory shared by writers like Anne Tyler, Alice Hoffman, and Sue Miller. Her prose is understated, her plotting is expert, and her emotional register is authentic. Critics occasionally faulted her for formula — the New England setting, the buried secret, the woman undone by revelation — but within that formula she produced genuinely affecting novels.
Her best work — The Weight of Water, The Last Time They Met, Fortune’s Rocks — transcends the domestic-suspense category into which her less ambitious novels sometimes fall. She was a more serious and more skilled writer than her commercial success sometimes suggested.
Collecting Shreve
The Pilot’s Wife (1998, Little, Brown) in first edition brings $10–$25 — ubiquitous after the Oprah selection. The Weight of Water (1997, Little, Brown) first editions are more sought by literary collectors, $15–$40. Strange Fits of Passion (1991, Harcourt) is scarcer. Eden Close (1989, Harcourt), her debut, is the scarcest Shreve first edition.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body Surfing Sydney, a young woman twice widowed under mysterious circumstances, takes a summer tutoring job at a New Hampshire beach house, where she becomes entangled with two brothers — a triangle that escalates from rivalry to tragedy, in Shreve's taut exploration of desire, jealousy, and the violence that simmers beneath summer idylls. | 2007 | Little, Brown | English |
| Fortune's Rocks In the summer of 1899, fifteen-year-old Olympia Biddeford has an affair with a forty-one-year-old married physician at her family's New Hampshire beach cottage — a liaison that destroys multiple lives, produces a child, and generates a custody battle that forces Olympia to confront the consequences of desire across class, gender, and law in turn-of-the-century America. | 1999 | Little, Brown | English |
| Resistance Set in occupied Belgium during World War II, Shreve's novel follows a Belgian woman who hides a wounded American bomber pilot in her attic — a dangerous intimacy that develops into love, testing the boundaries of loyalty, resistance, and the moral compromises that war demands of ordinary people. | 1995 | Little, Brown | English |
| Sea Glass Set during the Depression in a New Hampshire mill town, Shreve's novel follows a newly married couple whose lives intersect with labor organizers, factory owners, and bootleggers — a multi-voiced narrative exploring how economic catastrophe strips away social pretense and reveals the fault lines of class, loyalty, and survival in 1930s America. | 2002 | Little, Brown | English |
| Strange Fits of Passion Shreve's debut novel, in which a woman flees her abusive husband with her infant daughter to a remote Maine fishing village, where she finds refuge and a new love — told retrospectively through a journalist's reconstruction of events, in a narrative that explores how violence reshapes identity and how the stories we tell about ourselves are always incomplete. | 1991 | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | English |
| Testimony A sex tape involving three prep school boys and a freshman girl circulates at a Vermont boarding school, destroying careers, marriages, and futures — told through the multiple perspectives of everyone affected, in Shreve's examination of how a single recorded act can radiate outward and devastate an entire community. | 2008 | Little, Brown | English |
| The Last Time They Met Three encounters between two lovers — at fifty-two, twenty-six, and fourteen — told in reverse chronological order, with a devastating final revelation that reframes everything the reader thought they understood about the relationship, the tragedy, and the nature of memory itself. | 2001 | Little, Brown | English |
| The Pilot's Wife Kathryn Lyons is awakened at 3 AM to learn her husband's plane has crashed into the Atlantic — then discovers that the man she married had a secret life entirely separate from the one she knew, in Shreve's bestselling exploration of marriage, deception, and the devastating gap between what we know and what we choose not to see. | 1998 | Little, Brown | English |
| The Weight of Water A dual-timeline novel interweaving a modern journalist's investigation of a notorious 1873 double murder on the Isles of Shoals with her own marital crisis — Shreve's most structurally ambitious work, exploring how violence echoes across centuries and how the stories we tell about the past reveal the truths we cannot face in the present. | 1997 | Little, Brown | English |
| Where or When Two people who shared a childhood romance at a Catholic summer camp thirty years earlier reconnect as adults — both married, both desperate — in a novel that examines the dangerous fantasy that lost love can be recovered and the devastating consequences when adults try to live inside a memory. | 1993 | Harcourt Brace | English |