The story behind the book
A UK psychologist and a journalist have written a dual-narrative novel about coercive control, financial abuse and recovery, under pseudonyms, for professional and personal reasons.
The book draws on professional experience of coercive control, financial abuse and what real recovery looks like. It is a thriller about a confident, intelligent woman in her sixties who loses everything to a charming man, and the long, unglamorous work of getting herself back.
The pen names are part of the story. The professional worlds that gave the novel its authority are the same worlds that ask its authors to keep their names off the cover. They are happy to talk at length about the book, about how coercive control works, and about what recovery looks like. They do not talk about themselves.
Angles that have interested journalists
- Coercive control of women over sixty, a group the public conversation about domestic abuse tends to leave out.
- Economic abuse: how a partner empties accounts and trusts with signatures freely given, and why the money so rarely comes back.
- Why capable, educated people fall for it, and what the research on trust, attachment and “wilful blindness” says.
- A civil justice system that can leave a victim with the bill: the novel’s court chapters are its angriest.
- Recovery as a craft: the psychologist’s view of what actually helps, from friendship to purpose to a change of scene.
- A novel with a resources section at the back, listing helplines and reading for anyone who recognises their own story.
