Novelist Anita Shreve, 71; best-sellers turned into films

When Oprah Winfrey selected “The Pilot’s Wife” for her reading club, it instantly became the country’s No. 1 best-seller. Anita Shreve appeared on Winfrey’s television show, along with several women whose husbands led hidden lives.

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 television book club, died March 29 at 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 became fixtures of countless book groups and 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 and starring Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley.

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 Victorian-era 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 with a knock on the door, as a woman is told that her husband, an airline 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,” 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; “The Last Time They Met” (2001), about two writers who rekindle their passion after long absences; and her final novel, “The Stars Are Fire” (2017), set against the backdrop of a 1947 forest fire in Maine.

Another of her books, 1995’s “Resistance,” about a Belgian woman who rescues a U.S. pilot in World War II, was made into 2003 film with Bill Paxton and Julia Ormond.

Shreve was sometimes criticized for overwrought writing — a sip from a water glass practically comes with a soundtrack: “His hand trembled in its epic progress from the table to the mouth” — and she especially resented the notion that the recurring theme of doomed romance limited her appeal solely to women.

“Love is a very devalued subject to be writing about these days,” she told the Boston Globe in 1998. “It’s hard for me to imagine what is more serious to write about: how it affects people right down to their soul, how it affects their families, how it affects their future.”

Anita Hale Shreve was born Oct. 7, 1946, in Boston and grew up in Dedham, Mass. Her father was an airline pilot, her a mother a homemaker.

She graduated from Tufts University in Medford, Mass., in 1968, then taught high school English for five years. She published short stories before working as a journalist in Kenya and later in New York.

She contributed to magazines, co-wrote three books on child care and published two books on women’s issues, “Remaking Motherhood,” about working mothers, and “Women Together, Women Alone: The Legacy of the Consciousness-Raising.” Her first novel, “Eden Close,” came out in 1989.

Shreve was almost secretive about her personal life. Her husband, Osborn, said in an interview that he did not know the names of two of her three previous husbands.