Exhibit Alexandra : a novel / Natasha Bell.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

His Perfect Wife proves how unknowable those closest to us can be.

"This smart, mirror maze of a thriller bristles with sharp edges, twisting familiar Gone Girl themes into Bell's own intense creation."-- Kirkus Reviews

Before she disappeared, Alexandra Southwood lived an average, happy life: devoted to the care and upkeep of her husband, Marc, and their two beautiful daughters. But now, held in a room against her will, Alexandra is forced to imagine how her family is coping in the wake of her disappearance. She finds solace in memories of their past, recalling her courtship with Marc and their marriage--all that he saved her from, all that she's lost.

Marc's pain is visceral. He thinks of nothing but Alexandra. Even when the police discover her bloody belongings, he cannot accept that she is gone. Marc is the only one who believes she's still alive, and he channels his pain into action, embarking on his own journey to find his wife, one that will lead him to discover answers to questions he never wanted to ask.

Previously published as Exhibit Alexandra

"An astutely written, complex debut ."-- The Guardian

"Beautifully insidious, a novel that outwits expectation at every turn ."--Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill

"[A] provocative debut thriller . . . Bell's daring performance can't be ignored." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2018 Natasha Bell Thursday, February 21, 2013 The Beginning   Marc sat on the bottom stair and tried not to think the worst. The voice continued: "The vast majority of people return safe and well within the first forty-eight hours, Mr. Southwood. There's no need to panic." There was a pause. Marc knew he should take comfort from this. Sit tight and wait for his wife to return with a perfectly reasonable explanation.   The officer said goodnight and the line clicked dead. As if that had solved the problem. As if Marc should have felt better.   Six hours down, forty-two to go.   I wish I could put myself there with him. I'd wrap first my arms and then my legs around his body, cling to him until we lost our balance and tumbled to the hallway floor. Tell him with my touch the one thing he needed to know that night: I'm here. Right here.   He stood up and replaced the receiver, severing his fingertip connection to the phone call and his one active plan to do something. The hairs on his arms stood on end as he shivered to a silent beat of something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong.   Perhaps he shouldn't have phoned the police. After all, I was a grown woman. Perhaps it was over the top to report me missing. It's not as if I had a curfew.   But I was a mother. My children were home and I was not. It's so unlike her. Marc had said that to the officer a moment ago. It'd felt like a whine; that childish word laughably impotent in the face of explaining the absolute abnormality of a woman who had always come home, day after day, year after year, not walking through our front door that night.   I was meant to have returned by the time he brought the girls back from swimming. We should have ordered a takeaway. We should have sat with our chow mein, chattering about open days and council cuts.   He tried my phone again. Off as usual. "My little Luddite," he'd called me when he asked if I wanted an iPhone for my birthday and I said I was perfectly happy with the two-year-old handset I had. It made calls and showed me my emails--what more did I want? He should have pestered me more. Another man would have given me one anyway, synced our calendars and address books, downloaded an app to keep tabs on me, made sure I couldn't get lost.   "It's Thursday, for God's sake," Marc said aloud. He paced to the window to peer on to the street again. I wouldn't miss Thursday Takeaway without a reason.   He raised his hand, scratched his left temple.   He'd tried to explain to the officer. Was Jones his name? Officer Jones thought we'd had a fight. People disappeared all the time.   I didn't, though.   I'd spent the day at work. Marc had rung my colleague, Paula, to check. She said we'd walked out of the building together. I'd wished her a good weekend because she had Friday off to attend some family wedding. She'd told me she'd try, though she hated the things, and we'd parted with a wave.   Whole hours had elapsed since that exchange. It was now 11 p.m. It was dark.   Such things bothered my husband. It didn't matter that I'd lived alone in cities before we met. It didn't matter that I'd spent more than a year wandering the streets of Chicago, an optimistic student wearing an armor of Pabst Best against the gangs and gun crime statistics. It didn't matter that I'd once parachuted from a plane, that I'd accidentally hit a black slope the first time I strapped skis to my feet, that I'd backpacked around India and spent a month living in a roach-infested squat in Alphabet City. My husband saw me as something fragile. He walked me home and met me from trains. He wanted to protect me.   Should he search the streets? Was that what one was supposed to do? Maybe he could ask a neighbor to watch the girls. But where would he go? Did people normally look in pubs and bars?   Marc clung to the idea that we were normal that night. We'd never aspired to be normal before. We'd felt unique. Special. But abnormal things didn't happen to normal people. So we were normal that night. And, in keeping with normality, where everyday anxieties outweigh even the most horrendous fears, my husband continued to care how others perceived us. Behind his concern for me bubbled a multitude of mundane worries: had Officer Jones thought him daft? Had Paula decided he was overbearing? Had he made a fool of himself?   I wouldn't be lounging in a bar, of course; I didn't even drink. Bus shelters? Restaurants? Late-night libraries? This was York in real life, not London in some dramatic episode of Spooks we were watching on a boxset binge. This was a picturesque tourist city where the most the police usually had to deal with was fishing stolen bikes out of polluted rivers. Besides, the races had been on and I abhorred town when the cobbled streets and listed bars filled with stumbling gamblers in their glad rags.   He walked into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Al would laugh, he thought. If she were here.   I'd have been more likely to roll my eyes, or stick my hands on my hips and give him that "seriously?" look. But maybe that's me being defensive. Under different circumstances, maybe I would have been amused by my unfailingly British husband. I suppose it's hard to tell from here.   At least Charlotte and Lizzie slept. He'd told them I had to work late. He hated lying to them, I know, but what could he have told a seven-and a ten-year-old? "I don't know where Mummy is, girls, and I'm trying not to imagine her dead in a ditch, so eat your noodles and we'll find a bedtime story."   I wasn't dead in a ditch.   He couldn't think like that.   Those things didn't happen.   Not here.   Not to us.   There would be a perfectly rational explanation for my absence and we'd both laugh about it tomorrow. I'd shriek, he thought, when I found out he'd called the police. It'd get pedalled out at dinner parties: the time he lost his head because I fell asleep on a friend's sofa. Our guests would hoot with laughter and he'd blush good-naturedly, happy as ever to play the bashful fool to my leading lady. I can still picture a future that looks like that.   But he'd rung our friends. Patrick first, of course. They'd known each other since university and Marc always turned to him for advice. His wife Susan picked up, though; Patrick was out. He tried Fran and Ollie, the other staples of our little gang of dinner party couples. Patrick had introduced us all years ago, when he and Fran worked in the same surgery, before Fran "sold out' and accepted a job in a private clinic. We saw these friends every week, went on holidays with them, looked after their kids when they needed help; they were our York family. Mark also tried my old school friend Philippa, then some of the numbers on the PTA phone tree. Nobody had seen me since our Valentine's party. Fabulous night. Tell Alex I loved her costume.   Of course, Susan, as soon as I determine she has a pulse, that'll be the first thing out of my mouth.   It wasn't Susan's fault. He shouldn't have snapped. But trust her to play the optimist, to utterly downplay even the most ridiculous of dramas. He made a note to apologize once this was over.   Over.   Despite his panic, he was still thinking in terms of resolution. The very worst things in life, our most fearful nightmares, they don't happen all at once. They creep up, lodge themselves gradually in our brains, worming their way slowly in so that once they become a reality they are already somewhat familiar. If my husband could have known the extent of the horror still to come he wouldn't have survived that night. As it was, he held hope like a pebble in his palm.   The kettle finished boiling, but he no longer wanted tea. He wanted his wife to come home and come to bed. He yawned. He'd had to get up early to finish marking. He hadn't been able to face it last night and the girls had wanted to play board games. I remember I'd sulked because he and Charlotte had formed an alliance, giggling mischievously as they swapped farmers for builders and negotiated defense strategies based on promised hugs and extra marshmallows on hot chocolates. I'd pushed my bottom lip out and batted my eyelashes as if blinking away tears. I remember noticing the new gap in Char's teeth when she grinned, the scab Lizzie kept scratching on her shin, the hole in the heel of Marc's sock, the hitch of the curtain where it'd been drawn hastily over the chair, the slight annoying angle of the Paul Nash print on the wall. The girls hadn't wanted to go to bed, but I'd persuaded them, as I had a thousand times. Then I came back down in Marc's favorite silk and did the same to him.   He crept upstairs to check on the girls now. Charlotte was sprawled face-down across her bed, the Pixar cover kicked to the floor and a brown bear--Puddles, lost thrice, replaced once, worn from a thousand cuddles--hovering precariously near the edge, ready to topple. Marc stepped quietly inside the room, picked the duvet from the carpet and laid it over our daughter's body. He moved Puddles to a safer spot by Char's pillow and touched her dark tangle of hair before retreating to the landing. He stepped along to Lizzie's room and cracked open the door. Our tightly balled eldest breathed evenly on the top bunk. Her face was turned to him and he opened the door further so the light fell on her features. He watched her eyelids flicker with sleep, her lips move silently. She looked like me. Even though she has Marc's fair coloring and everyone always said Char was my double, Lizzie his--as if our genes had been neatly split, offering us one daughter each--I could always see myself in Lizzie too. In the roundness of her face and the line of her lips.   Marc closed the door to Lizzie's room and descended the stairs. What was he supposed to do? He sat down and stood up. Paced from lamp-lit living room to shoe-cluttered hallway, on to Szechuan-smelling kitchen. Tried my mobile once more. He'd called the hospital an hour ago and I hadn't been admitted. Was it time to ring again? He switched on the TV, but heard it through a tunnel. The only sound he wanted to hear was my key in the lock. Excerpted from Exhibit Alexandra: A Novel by Natasha Bell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Marc and Alexandra Southwood had been married for 13 years and had two daughters when Alexandra vanished on her way to work. Police find her bicycle and lots of blood on the river path but no trace of Alexandra. Absent a body, Marc believes that she is alive, rejects police evidence to the contrary, and begins a compulsive, hopeless search for his wife. Meanwhile, from a captive location, Alexandra has nothing to do but think and worry as she is regularly fed and shown footage of Marc on the news. The flashbacks on marriage and discovered correspondence from Alexandra's fellow art student Amelia allow the narrator to provoke fascinating discussions on the meaning of life and loss, of aesthetic concerns and real issues, and on the value of art and the meaning of perception. Katherine -McEwan's reading, with British and American accents as appropriate, brings the characters to life. VERDICT A solid psychological novel; highly recommended for adult fiction/mystery collections.-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

"A lot of what I'm writing almost definitely never happened. I wasn't there, obviously. I was missing." So says Alexandra Southwood, a University of York art history lecturer who has vanished. Early on, British author Bell signals that her provocative debut thriller-centering on Alexandra and Marc, her husband, who refuses to stop searching for her-isn't going to be just another missing person mystery. But the full extent of her audacity only becomes evident toward the end of this ingenious optical illusion, which may leave some readers gasping in admiration and others angry at being played. The more the devastated Marc learns about the woman to whom he's been married for years, all the while struggling to comfort and maintain some semblance of normalcy for the couple's two young daughters, the more he's forced to face the stomach-churning prospect that he may never really have known her at all. On one level a gripping page-turner and on another a disturbing exploration of identity, art, and decency, Bell's daring performance can't be ignored. Agent: Marilia Savvides, Peters Fraser & Dunlop (U.K.). (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Marc Southwood, along with his two young daughters, is devastated when his wife, Alexandra, vanishes during her evening commute. Marc's insistence that Alexandra is in danger is confirmed when police find her blood-soaked belongings abandoned on a riverbank. Responding to rumors of Alexandra's marital discontent, and questioning the absence of her passport, detectives focus suspicion on Marc. In contrast, Alexandra's interspersed accounts of what happened support Marc's claims that the Southwoods remain deeply in love. But their story begins to prickle with hints of resentment as Bell gradually chronicles the couple's life together, from Alexandra's impulsive abandonment of her spot in an elite Chicago art program to remain with Marc in York, England, to the dramas of their growing family. Furthering the growing sense of unease, letters from Alexandra's friend Amelia, a famous performance artist, reveal Marc's desperation for Alexandra's attention and her unsettling pathological determination to cross any lines to further her art. A moody, gut-wrenching tale of domestic ennui, feminism, and identity, recommended for literary-thriller devotees and book groups.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2018 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A husband, horrified at his beloved wife's disappearance, begins to question their entire marriage, and his very reality, in Bell's assured debut.Alexandra and Marc Southwood have a wonderful marriage of 13 years and two beautiful little girls, Charlotte and Lizzie. When Alex doesn't come home one night, Marc is flummoxed. The North Yorkshire Police aren't immediately concerned, but when she hasn't returned a day later and they uncover her bloody clothing, Marc fears the worst. As the police investigate, they turn up shocking things that Marc never knew about Alex, leading him to do some investigating of his own. The book is narrated entirely by Alex: she makes it clear that what she's writing, presumably while in captivity, are guesses about Marc's actions based on how well she knows him as well as her access to things like a recording of Marc's phone call to the police and his credit card statement; she also gives us glimpses into the early days of their marriage. Interspersed with Alex's narration are letters from Amelia Heldt, an old friend and performance artist in New York who expresses an undeniable yearning for Alex. Bell paints a convincing portrait of a woman struggling with society's tendency to put a man's needs and desires over those of women and the guilt that accompanies a mother's longing for fulfillment outside of marriage and children. Alex is passionate and complex, and her almost aggressive idealism can grow tiresome, but her yearning to be something "more" is palpable, leading her to blur the lines between life and art. For readers into controversial performance art, which Alex especially admires, and art in general, there's a lot to chew on, but even if not, the truth behind Alex's disappearance is a doozy, and the finale is satisfying while offering plenty of food for thought. Is Alex an unreliable narrator? Of course she is, but this is no bait and switch. Bell gives us all the clues and dares us to follow them to the shocking end.This smart, mirror maze of a thriller bristles with sharp edges, twisting familiar Gone Girl themes into Bell's own intense creation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.