← Books
Cover of The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Psychological Thriller · Free kit

The Silent Patient

Alex Michaelides

Alicia Berenson is a celebrated London painter with a house on the edge of Hampstead Heath and a marriage that looks, from the outside, like the kind people envy. One August night she shoots her husband Gabriel five times, then never speaks again. Six years later, criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber takes a job at The Grove, a secure forensic unit, determined to make her talk. What follows is a locked-room mystery of the mind: a diary, a Greek myth, a therapist who is not telling you everything, and a silence that is doing more work than speech.

“Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband.”

Complete free book club kit

BookClubee may earn a commission from Bookshop.org purchases, which supports independent bookshops.

Plan your meeting

Reading schedule · Book vote

The Silent Patient Speed Debates

Choose a prompt, pick a side, defend it for 60 seconds.

Speed Debate

Theo is the villain of The Silent Patient, not a tragic antihero.

vs.