My Husband's Wife

My Husband's Wife by Alice Feeney is a standalone psychological thriller published in January 2026, her eighth novel and an instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. It's widely considered the most ambitious premise she's attempted since Sometimes I Lie - a book whose central mystery is so fundamentally strange that even describing it without spoilers requires some care.

Eden Fox sets off for a run on the morning of her first art exhibition. She lives in Spyglass, an old cliffside house in the Cornish village of Hope Falls, with her husband Harrison and the life she's spent years building. When she returns home, her key doesn't fit. A woman who looks very much like her answers the door. And Harrison - who has been her husband for years - looks at Eden as though he has never seen her before, tells the police he doesn't know who she is, and confirms quietly that the woman standing inside is his wife. One house. One husband. Two women claiming to be the same person. Someone is lying, and the novel spends the next two hundred pages making sure readers can't quite work out who.

The second timeline runs six months earlier and follows Birdy - a Londoner reeling from a terminal diagnosis - who discovers she has inherited Spyglass from a grandmother she barely knew. In attempting to understand her grandmother's life, Birdy stumbles onto Thanatos: a mysterious London clinic that claims, with apparently verifiable accuracy, to be able to predict a person's exact date of death. Thanatos is run by Harrison Wolfe, who is - in the present timeline - Eden's husband. The connection between Birdy's inherited house, Harrison's company, and the woman on Eden's doorstep is the central puzzle Feeney constructs and guards carefully until the very end.

The Gaslighting mechanics at the heart of the present-day storyline are some of the most destabilising in Feeney's catalogue. Eden's situation strips away every external confirmation of identity - her husband, her home, her belongings - in a way that would make even the most grounded reader question what they actually know, and the Identity & Memory questions that follow cascade outward through both timelines with real cumulative unease. The Multiple Timelines structure alternates between Eden's increasingly desperate present and Birdy's past investigation, with Feeney connecting them carefully enough that the Mystery and Secrets Revealed feels constructed rather than accidental, even as it keeps reversing what readers think they understand.

The Obsession & Desire threading through the novel - between characters, and for the kind of life that seems just out of reach - gives the domestic surface of the story real psychological depth, and the Dark Secrets that eventually surface around Spyglass, Thanatos, and the connections between Birdy, Eden, and Harrison resist easy resolution right up to the final stretch. The Twist Ending has divided readers in Feeney's familiar pattern - some find it jaw-dropping and perfectly set up, others feel it accumulates one layer too many - but there is consistent agreement that the premise alone is unlike anything else in contemporary domestic suspense.

The audiobook, narrated by Richard Armitage, Bel Powley, and Henry Rowley, has received particularly strong praise, and several reviewers suggest it as the preferred format for a novel whose atmosphere benefits from the added dimension.