Claire McGowan

• "Now that I’d lost you, it seemed to me the hardest thing a human would ever have to face was how to live without the person their heart was tied to. Every day I had to remind my brain and body I was never going to see you again. Remind my skin it would never feel your hands again. Remind my hands they would never touch your back as you slept. Never. I don’t think humans are really built to understand what that means. I told myself it should have been easy. All I had to do was go into my house, and shut the door, and live out the rest of my life without you."

• "When you hear stories about women who are married to serial killers – Sonia Sutcliffe, for example – or whose husbands turn out to have four other families stashed away, you always say, how could she not know? She must have known. But I realised now that some people were just so good at lying that you not only believed them, you actually did your best to. You so much want to believe that what they tell you is true, you do the lying for them."

~ Excerpts from The Other Wife, by Claire McGowan