Excerpt from The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It is not that he expects Charlotte to come home and say she's perfectly well. She isn't, of course she isn't, that's why she went to the doctor in the first place. The headaches, the nausea. The way she works through the night, sleeps a couple of hours, then gets up for Lucie at the crack of dawn. He has to clear her paints and brushes from the bench in the morning to make himself some toast.

A dog-eared copy of Yeats's The Wind Among the Reeds lies open, facedown, on the coffee table beside him. He's supposed to give a lecture next week on the early love poems, but every time he tries to prize one apart he finds himself lost in a tangle of memories. Reciting "The Cap and Bells" to Charlotte in the summer, the two of them lying in the grass and watching puffs of bright clouds. Or reading the poems together by winter firelight: "When You Are Old" and "To an Isle in the Water." Shy one, shy one, shy one of my heart.

Someone once told him that the southern sun could cure all manner of ailments. It does look bright, in the picture. It is certainly an improvement on the Women's Voluntary Services for Civil Defence pamphlet that Charlotte keeps taped to the side of the fridge. In case of emergencies. She likes to think of emergencies. That pamphlet also came through the letter box, a long time ago now. The paper is grimy with dust and the tape has browned and been replaced, the top right corner torn away with the old Sellotape, taking with it part of the title—something about the larder and what to stock in an emergency, all that bother about the atomic bomb—but the rest of the lettering remains clear. Henry knows it by heart; from a slight distance it looks like a poem and he is unconsciously drawn to read it, over and over again, so that by now the thing has lodged itself permanently in his brain.

Excerpted from The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop. Copyright © 2016 by Stephanie Bishop. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.