The Lovers

The Lovers is an arresting tale, a mystery with a slow burn tension, which revolves around the disappearance of Lucie Bruyère. The novel unveils the truth about her charismatic yet subtly controlling partner, the world-famous artist Ernest Renfield. The suspenseful story, both police investigation and multi-voiced Rashomon, ends in a dramatic and powerful illumination.

Praise for The Lovers

‘I found The Lovers utterly compelling. This impeccably crafted novel told from multiple perspectives offers the page-turning suspense of a mystery while resisting easy resolution. It is ultimately a meditation on making art: the cost it exacts and the solace it brings.’

— Michelle de Kretser, author of Questions of Travel and The Life to Come, and twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award.

‘Rey’s sophisticated psychological thriller grips us from the start…The Lovers is an impressive feat of complex and nuanced story-telling. It spans continents, generations, multiple viewpoints, it inhabits characters whose sensibilities and endeavours place them fundamentally at odds.’

— Sydney Morning Herald

‘…this year already has an outpouring of art-inspired Australian fiction. Here is some of the best…The least flattering portrait of a painter is in The Lovers, an intriguing and elegant short novel by French-born Catherine Rey.’

— Susan Wyndham, LOOK Magazine

‘The Lovers is a brilliantly structured whodunnit mystery. It begins as Lucie Bruyère has disappeared from the secluded mansion of her partner, the eccentric painter Ernest Renfield…This elegant novel is less about Lucie’s disappearance than, as one character puts it, the mystery of why ‘pain prevents us from loving’.’

— Good Reading Magazine