Emma Healey’s two previous novels explored themes vivid in her own life. The protagonist of her bestselling debut, Elizabeth Is Missing, for which Healey won the 2014 Costa first novel award, is Maud, who has dementia but is forced to turn detective in the hunt for her missing friend. Magnificently rendered by Glenda Jackson in the BBC adaptation, she was in part inspired by Healey’s desire to see the world through the eyes of her grandmother, who had the disease. Her 2018 follow-up, Whistle in the Dark, allowed Healey to consider what her teenage depression might have been like for her mother. Her new novel has an autobiographical element, too.
Sweat is a psychological thriller about coercive relationships, the futility of revenge and when self-control turns pathological. It’s the latter that bled into the plot from Healey’s life. An exercise and fasting regime following the birth of her daughter in 2017 became obsessive and damaging, just as it does for Cassie in the book after she meets Liam, “man of my dreams, star of my nightmares, my mentor, my shadow”. A personal trainer, Liam is physically perfect, from the curl of his eyelashes to the way his muscles “hum”, and when he meets Cassie, he wants to help her be just as perfect. Soon he controls everything from her punishing runs to her calorie intake.
