Verity

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Lowen Ashleigh is broke, recently bereaved and about to lose her flat when a job lands in her lap that she cannot afford to turn down. A bestselling novelist called Verity Crawford has been left unable to write after a car accident, and her husband Jeremy wants someone to finish the last books in her series. Lowen moves into the family home to work through Verity's notes. What she finds instead, buried in the clutter of the office, is an autobiography. It was never meant to be read. It describes, in calm and terrible detail, what Verity really felt about her husband and her children, and what happened on the night the family fell apart.

From there the book runs on two questions. Should Lowen show Jeremy what his wife wrote, and does she want to, now that she is falling for him? Verity herself lies upstairs, mute and apparently unaware, while a nurse tends to her. Every creak in the house starts to feel like a message. It is pulpy, it is frank about sex, and it is very hard to switch off.

Verity is the one proper thriller Colleen Hoover has written, and it has drifted in and out of the charts ever since it first appeared. It is climbing again now because the film version has just opened in cinemas, which makes this a good moment to hear the story the way its fans first met it.

Two narrators, two versions of the truth

The novel alternates between Lowen's present-day chapters and the pages of Verity's hidden manuscript, and the Audible Studios production gives each strand its own voice. Vanessa Johansson reads Lowen, nervous and watchful, a woman who keeps telling herself she is imagining things. Amy Landon reads Verity's confession, and she plays it flat and unhurried, which is far more unsettling than any shouting would be.

That split is the reason the audio edition earns its place. On the page you turn from one typeface to another. In your ears you move from one woman's head into another's, and the contrast does half the work of the suspense. Several listener reviews single out Landon's chapters as the part that stays with them, and it is easy to see why. At just over eight hours it is a weekend's listening, or a week of commutes, and most people will not stretch it out that long.

The ending people still argue about

No spoilers here, but you should know going in that the final pages are deliberately ambiguous. The book ends on a document that contradicts much of what you have been told, and it leaves you to decide which account of Verity to believe. Some readers love that. Others feel cheated. A later edition added a bonus chapter that was supposed to settle matters and, by most accounts, just gave everyone more to fight about.

This is worth knowing because it changes how you listen. The two-narrator setup quietly nudges you toward trusting one voice over the other, and the ending asks whether that trust was earned. It is a cleverer trick than the lurid plot might suggest, and it rewards a second hearing.

Book first, then the film

The adaptation, directed by Michael Showalter, reached cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic this week after a London premiere. The three leads are well matched to the parts.

• Verity Crawford: Anne Hathaway
• Lowen Ashleigh: Dakota Johnson
• Jeremy Crawford: Josh Hartnett

Critics have been split. Several called it the best Colleen Hoover adaptation so far, and reviewers who disliked the film still praised Hathaway. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian felt the story disintegrates by the end, Variety dismissed it as a dud, while Matt Zoller Seitz enjoyed its wickedly playful streak. The aggregate scores sit in the mixed middle.

That mixed verdict is actually a good argument for the audiobook. Most of what critics missed in the film is interior: Lowen's second-guessing, the slow poison of Verity's prose, the way the manuscript chapters rewrite everything around them. Those are exactly the things two narrators can carry and a camera struggles with. If you want to understand why this story sold in such numbers, the audio is the version to start with, and the film will make more sense afterwards.

The romance writer who went dark

Colleen Hoover grew up in Texas and worked as a social worker before she started writing. She self-published her first novel, Slammed, in 2012 so that her mother could read it on a new Kindle, and Hopeless became the first self-published novel to top the New York Times bestseller list. It Ends with Us, a romance about domestic abuse drawn partly from her mother's life, made her a household name once BookTok picked it up, and by late 2022 she had sold more than twenty million books.

Verity was her deliberate step outside romance. She put it out on her own in late 2018, as an independent project, before Grand Central Publishing took it on in 2021 as the book's following grew. In Britain it won Pageturner of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2023, which is about as honest a label as this novel could get.

One caveat: it is explicit in places and deals with the death of children, so it is firmly an adult listen. If that does not put you off, this is a tight, nasty, well-performed thriller, and the Audible free trial covers the whole thing.

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