A Week in October

A mystery novel where the heart is the culprit and the reader is the detective sleuthing for two truths—the story’s and their own

A Week in October is a thriller for those of us who usually prefer a good love story that you just can’t put down. In other words it is a thriller-of-the-heart, where the spirit of "dangerous liaisons" is set against the all too familiar and difficult background of breast cancer. The beautiful wife of a successful Chilean architect courageously confronts her illness, mastectomy, and treatment while recording her thoughts and experiences in her journal. What develops is a thinly veiled version of her own life, her disappoint with their cold marriage, her reminiscences of childhood, and the death that seems to surround her. Her husband discovers the notebook and is stunned: How does she know that he had a mistress all these years? Is he really such a fatuous bore? Could it be true that his sick wife had a passionate love affair with one of his colleagues, right under his nose? Is this just a fictional story—he asks himself, turning the pages—or his wife’s very personal diary as she awaits death?

A bestselling Latin American author, A Week in October is Elizabeth Subercaseaux’s first novel to be translated into English. This extraordinary tale about erotic tension, deception, resilience, and death keeps us in suspense, between laughter and tears, until the unexpected, haunting ending that ponders the mysteries of a woman's heart, where truth is a lie and a lie is truth.