Overview: Dr Lanning, Catherine Stannard and Patrick Hawton are thrown together by a motorway tragedy. Dr Lanning is treating Catherine and Patrick for PTSD, the loss of their loved ones, their different approaches to feeling and dealing with survivor guilt.

Through shared therapy sessions, Catherine and Patrick form a bond, allowing them to relinquish their previous lives and inhibitions. Dr Lanning sees an opportunity to study them, using them to rebuild his reputation. In doing so, he creates an environment where Catherine and Patrick begin to lose sight of their new realities.

Verdict: In what has quickly risen to become a Top 10 novel of the year to have read, The Quietist: A Novel by author Daniel David Gothard is one of those books you might well pick up simply having been intrigued by the title and cover art. But trust me when I say that once you open it and start to read, well, you will find it mighty difficult to put this book down before the final chapter is upon you.

In what is a breathy, yet downright engrossingly enraptured read, the story given of a shared connection between a doctor and his two patients is one not only subtlety, yet intensely disturbing as it grows, but at the very same time has been created with a magnificent grasp of genius, and dutifully complex storytelling.

As we soon learn, Dr. Lanning is not the person who should be attempting to counsel both Catherine Stannard and Patrick Hawton, especially given that he himself had lost his wife in similar circumstances to both Catherine and Patrick, who themselves had survived a massive pile-up; one that had taken Catherine’s partner and Patrick’s wife.

At just 168 pages The Quietist: A Novel is a book that might even have you so intensely connected to every word of prose captured within that you read it in just the one session. I suggest you do. For this distressing, disturbing human drama, all played out within the psyche of modern existence is one that is as compelling a read as I have myself undertaken in quite a long time.

About the Author - Daniel David Gothard is an award shortlisted author who has published three novels and many short stories, in the UK and abroad. He lives in Reading, UK.

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