Metz and her writer husband, renowned for his extravagant dinner parties and charismatic charm, live with their young daughter in picket-fence splendour an hour outside New York City. She runs a successful design business and enjoys a coterie of friends, and Henry has just begun work on a food book about umami, the Japanese idea of perfection. When he suddenly drops dead from an embolism, Metz’s life is thrown into chaos. She is stricken with grief, then humiliation, bewilderment and rage, when she discovers Henry had been engaged in multiple affairs, one for three years with a presumed friend, who at the time of discovery is babysitting her daughter.

So begins her dig beneath the deceptive surface of her life. In a deeply honest, intelligent and unputdownable memoir, Metz trawls through Henry’s emails, notes, books, psychoanalysis and her own life, and confronts the five women he was involved with. Seeing Metz deal with such loss and betrayal is painful yet somehow captivating, as is the way she dismantles her lost husband without vengeance, while seeking to understand him. A top read.