Genevieve Wheeler

Adelaide follows an American woman in London through a relationship with a man who is charming, unavailable and eventually cruel, and refuses to make her behaviour dignified.

Wheeler wrote it after living in London herself, and the specificity of the friendships around the romance is what keeps the book from being only about him.

It goes to a place involving sudden death and grief that the opening chapters do not prepare a reader for, which some found dishonest and others found exactly right.