Best-selling novelist of ‘Pilot’s Wife’
Anita Shreve, who explored themes of love, loss and betrayal in best-selling works of fiction, and whose 1998 novel, “The Pilot’s Wife,” sold millions of copies after Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club, has died her home in Newfields, N.H. She was 71.
The cause was breast cancer, said her husband, John Osborn.
Shreve was a teacher, journalist and nonfiction author before she began to focus on fiction in her early 40s. She went on to publish 18 novels, which attracted a large and loyal following.
Many of Shreve’s novels were set in New England and touched on subjects as diverse as airplane crashes, textile mills and World War II. Her books seldom had happy endings, but all of them shared an irresistible page-turning quality, with a strong emotional undercurrent, often colored by death and romance.
Critics were not always kind — “the presiding spirit is Fabio, not Henry James,” one reviewer sniffed in the New York Times — but readers adored Shreve’s books. “Her secret,” Washington Post journalist Zofia Smardz wrote in 2002, “is that she simply has the Gift — the ability to hook you from the first page, draw you in and pull you along, though you may kick and scream, and not let go until the final word.”
Shreve’s first major best seller came in 1997, with “The Weight of Water.” A photojournalist travels to an island off the coast of New England to examine the mystery of a 19th-century double murder as her marriage unravels. The novel was made into a movie in 2000 directed by Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow.
Shreve said her writing was often inspired by old houses: “A house with any kind of age has dozens of stories to tell,” she told Writer magazine. One Victorianera house on the Maine coast became practically a living character in several novels.
“At first, all I wanted to do was live there,” she told the Times in 2002. “Then, at a party, I overheard a snippet of conversation about an airline crash, and I began to imagine the pilot’s wife. And there was this one split second in time when that idea came together with the house.”
The novel that emerged was “The Pilot’s Wife,” which begins as a woman is told that her husband, a pilot, has been killed in a midair explosion off the coast of Ireland. She later learns that her husband has led a double life, with a mistress in another country, among other secrets. The airliner accident may have been a deliberate act of sabotage.
When Winfrey selected “The Pilot’s Wife” for her reading club, it instantly became the country’s No. 1 best seller. Shreve appeared on Winfrey’s television show, along with several women whose husbands led hidden lives.
“Each story was much worse than anything I’d written,” Ms. Shreve later said. “Real life is invariably worse than novels.”
More than 3 million copies of “The Pilot’s Wife” were sold, and Shreve wrote the screenplay for a 2002 TV movie starring Christine Lahti and Campbell Scott.
Shreve’s other works included “Fortune’s Rocks” (1999), a story of illicit love at the turn of the 20th century; and her final novel, “The Stars Are Fire” (2017), set against the backdrop of a 1947 forest fire.
In addition to her husband, survivors include two children from her marriage to John Clemans; three stepdaughters; two sisters; and three grandchildren.