A Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year
'Does art enhance life, or negate it? The painful question runs through Lowry's portrait of Thomas Hardy, and produces a sombre, delicate novel, finely judged and full of insight' Hilary Mantel


One Wednesday morning in November 1912 the ageing Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she has gone.

The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words - leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.

Hardy's bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma's effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled 'What I Think of My Husband'. He discovers what Emma had truly felt - that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever marry?

He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to re-evaluate himself, and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.

Hardy's pained reflections on the choices he has made, and must now make, form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. The Chosen - the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry - hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret; life and art.

"'[A] novel which is both a fascinating analysis of Hardy and a powerful and exquisite work of art in its own right . . . her writing is utterly without mercy while also being underpinned by deep compassion . . . Lowry's view of marriage and, more particularly, the creative life is almost unbearably bleak, but her novel is glorious - the best that I have read in several years." - Literary Review

"Hardy's doomed first marriage is the subject of this beautifully rendered and poignant novel . . . The prose is exquisite . . . Above all, like many of the best novelists, Lowry understands the intricacies of the human heart. " - The Times

"In this exquisite imagining of the days after Emma's unexpected death, The ­Chosen excavates Hardy's emotions . . . Felled by the bitterness in her diaries . . .Hardy experiences 'a savage sense of liberty' and overwhelming feelings of loss, beautifully described in Lowry's bellclear, silvery prose." - Daily Mail

"This novel is exquisitely written and powerfully perceptive, yet never loses sight of its biographical nature." - Country Life

"Deserves to be read by anyone interested in Thomas Hardy or in good literature." - Sherborne Times

"A stylistic tour de force . . . Miss this work of art -- and cautionary tale against long-term gaslighting -- at your peril." - Strong Words

"The Chosen combines psychological depth with prose of mesmerising beauty. The result is an exquisite double portrait of a marriage and a writer, and the elusively complex relationship between the two. This is a novel of tremendous range, from the elegiac to the humorous to the sublime. Vladimir Nabokov described the best of fiction as "a game of intricate enchantment and deception". In this heartbreaking, life-affirming exploration of the perversity of the human heart and the paradox of creativity, Elizabeth Lowry shows herself the mistress of both." - Financial Times

"A lyrical meditation on love and literary inspiration. Lowry's richly evocative novel plunges the reader into Hardy's day-to-day life at Max Gate, the Dorset house he built for himself, as he rakes over the ashes of his strained marriage and channels his grief into the extraordinary outpouring of creativity that was the "Poems of 1912-13"." - Financial Times (Best Summer Books 2022)

"A wise and beautifully written book" - The Times

"Lowry's theme is the underside of artistic devotion - the monstrousness of the writing life for those closest, or trying to be. In the year in which we lost Hilary Mantel, it's a real joy to have discovered in Elizabeth Lowry another meticulous, restrained and humane chronicler of lives past. I'll be looking out for more of her work." - The Lonely Crowd (Book of the Year)

"An extraordinary feat of imagination, perception and empathy" - Irish Times