The Weight of Water Reading Group Companion

Enthusiastically embraced by critics, readers, and booksellers across the country, this powerful novel of obsession and betrayal became a word-of-mouth hardcover bestseller. Now The Weight of Water is poised to reach an even larger readership in trade paperback.”I wonder If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?” So muses Jean, a photographer, who in 1995 arrives on Smuttynose Island, off the coast of New Hampshire, to research a legendary crime that took place more than a century earlier. As she immerses herself in the details of the case — a fit of passion that resulted in the deaths of two women — Jean herself becomes caught in the grip of an uncontrollable emotion. The suspicion that her husband is having an affair burgeons into jealousy and distrust, ultimately clouding Jean’s senses and propelling her to the verge of actions she had not known herself capable of — actions with horrific, irreversible consequences.