The unnamed narrator is a young woman who is assaulted on her way home one evening. While she escapes any major injuries, the trauma of the event stays with her. She has a husband who tries to help and a son who helps distract her, but she can’t let go of the need to escape London. She gets a job teaching creative writing at a college away from London, meaning her husband must stay back and visit on the weekends.

As she begins her new job, she is soon overwhelmed by all of the extra work the departmental head heaps on her. She is trying to be a good teacher but is unsure of herself. Her students’ writing submissions are interspersed into the novel. One student in particular, Nicholas, has an unusual writing style. In class he informs the others that he only writes the truth. His story reflects that his truth is rife with tragedy.

Nicholas has a party at his house and invites the class, including the teacher. When it is time for her to leave, Nicholas insists on walking her home. She feels very intoxicated, much more than she should for the amount she drank. As she tries to leave Nicholas and enter the house, he convinces her to let him in. He later comes on to her, and when she resists, he forces himself on her.

During school break, Nicholas tries to contact the teacher through text messages, but she ignores him. When the class returns from break, Nicholas does not attend. The teacher tries to find out what happened to him. She is fearful of what this all might mean for her, and she is worried for him as well based on how discomfiting his stories are. It is at this point in the novel when the slight sense of foreboding intensifies.

Her life begins to fall apart one piece at a time. Her husband leaves her for his coworker. One of her students has made a complaint about her, insinuating that the teacher and Nicholas have an inappropriate relationship and blaming her for his absence. Then she learns that what Nicholas portrayed in his writing was only his truth and not the actual truth. Nicholas may be much more dangerous than she thought, and the tragedy he writes about may have been of his own deadly making.

It all comes to a head one night when she sees Nicholas, who she thinks is in a mental health institution, outside of her house. He tries to break into the house, and the teacher must escape with her toddler son. He manages to catch up with her, hitting her with a flashlight. Her son runs to the neighbor’s house, and the neighbor scares Nicholas off. They later find his body, overdosed on the drugs that he intended to give to the teacher.

This novel was intriguing despite a lack of a great deal of action most of the time. A lot of the fuel is a growing sense of doom. Something seems off with the college, the job, the town, the husband, and with Nicholas, and the reader is impelled to find out what is going on. The fact that the protagonist is a creative writer, it was not surprising to find the writing itself was literary. There were elements that I felt were overstated, such as descriptions of her son, and others that were understated, such as the character development of the narrator. Otherwise it was nicely paced and not bogged down too much in description.

Okay, I am going to have to read more by this author. This is an excellent thriller, full of emotion and nuance and skilled character development in addition to plot. I'm not a huge fan of novels about novelists, but this one works. And really makes me want to move to a country with nationalized health care. A bit of a Secret History feel for the first half. ( )

In The Body Lies, a young writer, seeking to distance herself from the trauma of an attack that occurred on a busy street in South London, takes a job teaching creative writing at a rural college. Pregnant at the time of the attack, Jo Baker’s unnamed narrator later gives birth to Sam. Her husband Mark has a teaching position in the city, but the narrator nonetheless applies for and, on the strength of a successful first novel and despite a woeful lack of teaching experience, lands the job. Unable to convince Mark to quit his job and come with her—knowing it’s unreasonable of her to expect him to—they arrange to live separately: she’ll take Sam—now a toddler—with her. Mark will visit on weekends. The new position entails instruction and administrative work, but once at the college, the narrator discovers that due to unforeseen staff absences, for the coming term she will be the sole lecturer in Creative Writing. Then inevitably, this being academia, her list of responsibilities expands. The combination of office tasks and teaching quickly becomes burdensome, and soon she is overloaded and struggling. But she enjoys her seminar. The students are smart, perceptive, sensitive and demanding. The standout in the class is Nicholas Palmer, a young man with passionate convictions and an uncompromising aesthetic. Nicholas is from a well-off local family and claims to write only “the truth.” Talented but also truculent and inflexible, Nicholas’s fiction is psychologically probing and disturbing. As the term progresses the narrator finds herself increasingly swamped and feeling helpless as well as conflicted about the job, her students, and her new colleagues. Then, at Christmas, she lets down her guard. An incident following a party alerts her to a new threat in her life, and memories of the man who assaulted her in London return full force. Jo Baker’s narrative begins with a description of a young girl left to die alone in the woods, but the meaning of this remains teasingly elusive until much later in the novel, when the narrator makes a series of alarming discoveries leading up to the violent denouement. To some extent, Baker’s novel relies on stereotypes to build its propulsive narrative. The narrator is an attractive young woman living alone with a small child in a remote setting, compelled by mounting evidence to act in ways that go against her trusting nature. But it is all so atmospheric, and the elements so expertly handled, that the reader is willing to forgive anything. ( )

A women takes a job away from her husband to help support them and her son. She is in a new job where she has no previous experience. But because she had a book that was published she is teaching others about how to write a book. Because of something that happened in her past she is cautious but still seams to make the wrong decisions. Then something transpires with one of her students. ( I don't want to give anything away). And you learn more about the student and her neighbors which fills in the story.

Reading this book was kind of like someone telling you about a time in there life within a period of about 3 years. The main character was like able, although sometimes I questioned her judgement. And It was a good story to read. I did like it, but it was not a book I would go on and on about. I gave this book 3 stars. ( )

this is going to haunt me for a long time.

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This review can also be found on my blog.

I was first drawn to The Body Lies after reading Rachel’s incredible review of it. I’m glad to have gotten her perspective, because I can see how going into this expecting a thriller would be disappointing. This is not a fast-paced crime novel; this is a quietly terrifying piece of literary fiction. Baker presents an examination of trauma as well as the objectification of women’s bodies that I will not be forgetting anytime soon.

The atmosphere is key here. An undercurrent of tension runs throughout this novel. As a reader I nearly always was on the edge of my seat waiting for things to go south even though, strictly speaking, not much was happening. Baker is masterful at making you truly feel the main character’s anxieties without even telling you what they are. I was incredulous at how certain events impacted me; events that objectively I wouldn’t have felt anything for become absolutely heart-wrenching when placed into context.

This is in part a tongue-in-cheek commentary about how women’s bodies are typically used in thrillers. Baker turns these tropes on their head, criticizing them while also demonstrating how to utilize them effectively. The setting really works here: a creative writing class allows us to see examples firsthand in an organic manner. The excerpts of her students’ writing don’t feel forced, and they add a great deal to the story.

What I found most impactful in this book was its portrayal (and analysis) of trauma. At the outset of the book, the narrator is attacked by a man on the street. The ways this impacts her life are both large and small, and I felt Baker did an incredible job of demonstrating that. Additionally, it quickly becomes clear that those outside a traumatic incident are not necessarily able to understand, or even notice, these impacts. My heart ached reading this; I felt like Baker was able to reach deep down inside me.

I honestly cannot recommend this book highly enough. As I said before, it will do you no good to go into this expecting a true thriller with a twisty plot. But if you’re looking for something dark and quiet that explores the way we treat women, you’re in for quite the treat. I’m certain I’ll be coming back to this again and recommending it left and right. Already my favorite book of the year (although I’ll revisit this in December), The Body Lies is honestly a masterpiece.

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