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Welcome to the VERANDA Sip & Read Book Club! Each month, we dive in to a book and offer exclusive conversations with the authors behind each tale over on Instagram, along with a perfectly matched cocktail. This month's pick is Alex Michaelides's The Maidens, a twisty story of Greek tragedies and murder at Cambridge University. Get caught up on our past book club selections here.
July has arrived, rumbling into mid-year with its sun-baked splendor, and with it, a volley of summer literary thrillers. But perhaps none checks that literary box quite like best-selling author Alex Michaelides's sophomore novel, The Maidens.
The Maidens is the story of Mariana Andros, a group therapist unable to shake the grief that has haunted (sometimes literally) her after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Sebastian, near Mariana's childhood home in Cyprus. While living and working in London, Mariana receives a call one night from her niece, Zoe, a student at Cambridge University. One of Zoe's friends has been murdered, and her sudden death has shaken the campus.
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While Cambridge is the last place Mariana wants to be right now, she drops everything to catch the train northward. A former student of the university herself, Mariana's memories of the stunning 13th-century university grounds are tinged by grief (it's where she fell in love with Sebastian), and the ghost of Sebastian flickers in and out at the precise moments that Mariana least expects it, throwing her constantly off-kilter. Mysteries abound at the university, but looming most large is Zoe's Greek tragedy professor, Edward Fosca. Charismatic and brilliant, Edward is the teacher of an all-female group of students known as the Maidens. They are a microcosm of Cambridge itself: beautiful, aloof, a world of their own. And the young girl who died was one of their members.
While everyone else falls easily under Edward's spell, Zoe's skittishness around him sets Mariana immediately on edge—and causes her group-therapist training to kick in. "As soon as any group establishes itself," Mariana explains, "it always arouses envy and attack—and not just from forces on the outside...but also from dark and dangerous forces within the group itself." And yet, the more Mariana pushes the authorities to take Edward seriously as a suspect, the more she's shunted to the side, fueling her to take matters into her own hands in order to prove Edward's guilt.
Then another one of the Maidens is found dead, and Mariana's suspicions deepen.
Circling Mariana's investigation, Zoe's fear of her professor, and the unusual, unshakable devotion of the Maidens to their teacher—even in the face of death—is the university itself. The winding paths, tucked-way alleys, and grandeur of the river are on full display, hosting the characters in a sinister yet elegant darkness. As Mariana's fixation with Edward's guilt threatens her hold on reality and the case against him, Edward and Mariana's own literary obsessions—the tragedies of Euripides, the rites of Persephone, the Jacobean drama The Duchess of Malfi, and Victorian poet Lord Alfred Tennyson—weave in and out of the plot, propelling it forward at a deliciously slow-burn speed. As Mariana risks everything to save the next young victim, classical myths and murder meld together under the spectral gaze of the university, galloping toward a twisting (and twisted) ending befitting a smash-hit literary thriller.
VERANDA SIP & READ BOOK CLUB FOR JULY 2021
Selection: The Maidens by Alex Michaelides (available via local booksellers, Amazon, or Bookshop)
Start reading with us July 1.
Send Michaelides your questions via VERANDA's Instagram Stories.
Tune in to Instagram as Michaelides answers your questions and chats live about The Maidens later in July.
