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Sweat

Reviewed by Gill Lowe

(Hutchinson Heinemann: 2024) by Emma Healey


Ten years ago Emma Healey published her Costa-winning debut, Elizabeth is Missing, to great acclaim. It was a multi-million seller, sensitively adapted for the screen with Glenda Jackson as Maud, the elderly woman with dementia. Whistle in the Dark came out in 2018 and concerns a depressed teenager who goes missing for several days with no easy explanation. 


Now we have Sweat (30 January 2025). This third novel shares with her others the plot arc of an investigation, by the author as well as by a character. Emma Healey is, again, interested in exploring destabilised and intriguing minds. Cassie and Liam have a complex, competitive and, ultimately, harmful relationship. Emma uses the trope of a labyrinth with Liam cast as the Minotaur, a bull-headed monster. The couple both work in the fitness industry where sweat is a positive by-product of demanding body work. Liam wields the upper hand, literally as well as metaphorically. We see him obsessively checking the contents of Cassie’s waste bin; interfering with how she breathes at night; micro-monitoring her food intake. Training the body is set here in parallel with training the mind. 


It is not a plot spoiler to say that Cassie learns how to seize power when Liam, apparently, becomes blind. She has learned coercion from Liam, an expert in that particular field. She finds her own ways of exercising revenge for his behaviour – after reading this book you will never be able to look in the same way at a tub of ‘Quality Street’ chocolates. Sympathy for the characters will vacillate as the twisty plot unravels. As the energetic narrative develops sweat becomes a by-product of mental fear - and of guilt - as well as of physical exertion.


We discover, through a series of flashbacks, how Liam controls Cassie, both physically and psychologically. Every time we go back in narrative time, the text is broken by a mischievous little dinkus of a person running. The start of each chapter has a similar stickperson lifting weights. The story is intense but there are also shifts in tone revealing an ironic, sly wit. The front cover design is a departure from Emma’s previous books. This has rather a playful cover in lurid salmon-pink, with a watchful female eye inside a huge, glistening bead of sweat. The book has been described as a feminist thriller; of course readers will decide for themselves if this is an appropriate description. Emma is brilliant at creating tension. It is certainly a taut page turner: one to read when you are not in a hurry to go to sleep. 


Emma Healey will be talking to the Suffolk Book League at an event at Ipswich Institute, 15 Tavern St, Ipswich IP1 3AA, UK




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