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Room 11 by Mari.Reiza
Women's Psychological Fiction
About the Book:
After an accident leaves his wife in a coma, he sits on a hospital chair day-in day-out singing to her. Nobody can pull him away from her as she threads through the rage that could save her. Meanwhile, a desperate nurse grows her admiration for him into obsessive desire.
Book Links:
Goodreads * Amazon
The Setting
A hospital room in a private clinic in London. The floors are squeaky clean. Patients smell lovely. Visitors sport well-polished shoes and smell too of expensive cologne; they’re not the kind you may suspect of stealing the antiseptic soap at the entrance, but instead talk in educated ways, despite concern for their loved ones sending them mad. In Room 11, a young comatose woman lies on a freshly made-up bed, her wealthy husband alongside a matronly foreign nurse diligently tending to them both.
Meet the Nurse
She has asked for Room 11 specifically, and for the best shifts to spend with its patient and her husband. On quiet night shifts, as she indulges on a hot-dog dinner with Maltesers before sitting in the dim quiet of the adjacent sleep-room reading secondhand romances, she listens to the husband sing. Her and him are on speaking terms, have shown each other their amulets, shared talk of their years spent in different Africas, even if she hides from him tales of her soulless apartment, her city’s horrific traffic and her lover scattered in pieces on a tree. How on earth can they keep going? Like her he deserves better. And now Dr. Patel has become a common denominator to both their destinies.
Meet the Husband
He arrived on his big feet one day, with his impotent rage and his books he has built into a confident pillar on the side of his hospital chair: every title about comas. On top, he rests his iPhone with her music. He puts his headphones on and sings. Sometimes he puts them in his wife’s ears and sings. He’ll know more about his wife’s condition than her nurse if he has read all his books, but only what he wants. He washes her hair daily in a shallow yellow bucket, rubs her legs caressing them; but her eyes remain shut. How can he see happiness in her outer beauty whilst inside she’s dead? He only leaves his guard to go home a few night hours, returning refreshed with a espresso in one hand and a cup of yogurt with honey in the other, and later to buy two sandwiches for lunch and dinner, both small enough to fit in his trouser pocket. He has left strict instructions, that he’s the only one allowed to visit, pretends the room should be as tightly guarded as a fisheries exclusion zone. He acts guilty. Does he have a secret?
Meet the Wife
She was labelled ‘Traffic accident abroad’ when she was first brought in from a foreign country where her family had stopped visiting, although her mother has since rang twice and her brother once, for a short call during which he only wept. In her sleep, she plunges into the abyss in search of why she’s here. She had been at a family wedding, with her husband. He knows she’s terrified of the lack of empathy between her and her mother dragging her down to the bottom of the ocean. And her own father won't travel to meet her either; is he fine to stop seeing each other? Even when she had been sick nobody asked of her diagnosis, not even her brother who increasingly feels like her negative about to tear his chains to her. Does she have a son? Is he the reason why she ended here? Is he behind her urge to return?
About the Author:
Mari.Reiza was born in Madrid in 1973. She studied at Oxford University and worked as an investment research writer and management consultant for twenty years in London, before becoming an indie fiction writer. Also by her, Inconceivable Tales, Death in Pisa, Sour Pricks, A Pack of Wolves, STUP, Mum, Watch Me Have Fun!, Marmotte’s Journey, West bEgg, Room 11, Triple Bagger, Caro M, Opera, the Retreat, sells sea shells and aberri (homeland), all available on Amazon.
Author Links:
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