Verity

Verity is Colleen Hoover's 2018 psychological thriller, originally a quiet release that broke out years later when BookTok rediscovered it in 2021 and pushed it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for the next two years. Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer in Manhattan, is hired by Jeremy Crawford to ghost-write the final three volumes of the bestselling crime fiction series that Jeremy's wife Verity has been unable to finish since the car accident that left her in a vegetative state. Lowen moves into the Crawford family home in Vermont to research Verity's notes and finds, in a desk drawer, what appears to be Verity's autobiographical manuscript. The manuscript is what Verity actually thought about her marriage, her children, and the two daughters who died.

Hoover's structural device is the embedded manuscript: chapters of the novel alternate between Lowen's increasingly compromised present-tense narration and Verity's first-person manuscript prose. The Verity manuscript chapters are the literary engine of the book; Hoover writes them with a tonal viciousness that is genuinely uncomfortable. The reliability question the novel poses in the back-third (is Verity's manuscript what she actually believed, or is it the kind of fictional confessional a thriller writer might leave around the house) is the structural payoff and the part that fueled the BookTok discourse for years. The romance plot between Lowen and Jeremy is the genre concession Hoover makes to her core audience, and it is the weakest part of the book.

Recommended for thriller readers, for the contemporary domestic-thriller core audience, and as the Hoover novel to read if you want to know what the BookTok discourse was actually about. Compare to Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn), Behind Closed Doors (B. A. Paris), and The Silent Patient (Alex Michaelides). The Vanessa Johansson / Amy Landon audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.