Lioness (Bloomsbury 2023) by Emily Perkins is a mesmerising and intimate account of the lives of two women as they slowly unravel due to both external circumstances and their interior struggles.
It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. You can see that it’s all going to go terribly wrong, but you can’t look away. The story is funny, deep, wise, thoughtful and troubling.
The cover is a perfect representation of the story.
Crafted in beautiful, literary language, Lioness is the story of Therese and Claire. Fifty-something Therese runs a series of artisan homewares shops, funded by her husband Trevor, from Trevor Thorne Developers, older than her by 20 years and a real mover and shaker in the world of building and development. Trevor used to be married to Judith, and they have four adult children (‘you make it sound like a diagnosis’) – who are variously well-off, avaricious or struggling, but who all still regard Therese as an interloper, despite her decades-long marriage to their father. This is a complex and complicated family, with multiple homes, business ventures, investments, divided loyalties, long-held grudges and a sense of entitlement.
Claire is their downstairs neighbour – wild, edgy, unpredictable, interesting, sensual and not intimidated at all by the Thorne’s wealth and position. As Claire and Therese grow closer, other links between their families are revealed. And when Trevor’s latest and biggest investment – a huge hotel – attracts a whiff of scandal, everyone in his orbit, but especially his wife, his ex-wife and his children, are drawn into the tabloid newspaper rumours and shame, with everyone offering a different opinion about what went wrong and how it should be fixed.
The tale is narrated by Therese and it becomes apparent that she doesn’t know anyone nearly as well as she thought she did, even her husband, but especially her friends. Her origin story is very different to Trevor’s and as she faces the onslaught of accusations of corruption and indifference, she questions her entire adult life, the status and privilege she has perhaps taken for granted and whether she is better or worse off than when she was young, naïve, poor and unknown.
This book explores issues of female friendships, marriage, blended families, power, ambition, loyalty, betrayal, wealth, privilege, intimacy, self-identity and self-empowerment. Perkins masterfully portrays the inner lives and interiority of the two main women, but also the other peripheral characters, giving each a rich and fleshed out backstory, believable motivations and yet still able to surprise us with the decisions and choices they make.
Lioness is a study of the human condition, and how one seemingly insignificant action can have enormous repercussions. The dialogue is sharp and on point, delineating each character effectively through the representation of their personality. This is a novel exploring how even the rich and powerful can have small lives, petty grievances, unresolved grief, unrequited desires, anxiety, unanswered questions and dysfunctional families.