The Public Version

A woman vanishes from a cottage on the tidal Suffolk coast on the night of her biggest public appearance. By morning, the country already knows who to blame.

Vivian Ash manages the truth for a living. She tells powerful institutions what to say when things go wrong, and she is the best there is. Then, hours after a television interview watched across the country, she walks out across the mudflats at low tide and does not come back.

Her partner, Theo Marsh, is a documentary editor, a man who has spent twenty years deciding what a story keeps and what it cuts. He knows better than anyone how a life can be re-narrated out of true facts placed in the wrong order, because it is now being done to him. Within days the public has its verdict. Every fact is real. Every fact is in the wrong order. And Theo is the only person who can see the edit, because he is the one who taught the world how to make it.

Told through the very record that convicts him, the broadcasts, the leaked memos, the sealed settlements, the voice notes, The Public Version is a psychological thriller about how easily a person is rewritten, about what institutions choose to bury, and about what it costs to tell the whole truth when the whole truth will destroy the person you love.

For readers who like their thrillers intelligent, British and morally serious, this is a novel that asks you to sit where the crowd sits, to judge, and then to watch your own certainty come apart.