“These prosecutors are rummaging in my closets, hoping to find skeletons. But all they will find are my beautiful clothes.” So says the fictional Marija Popa, adapting an infamous phrase from Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, as she prepares to stand trial for her late husband’s crimes.
Popa is the anti-heroine of The Dictator’s Wife, a debut novel by a young British Indian writer, Freya Berry, that explores how tyrants deploy glamorous spouses to soften their image: velvet gloves to their iron fists.
