Euphoria

Elin Cullhed's novel follows Sylvia Plath through the final year of her life, tracing a gifted and restless mind as it struggles both with itself and with the expectations placed on a woman of her time. Her early life is portrayed as a rush of talent and promise, but that path is cracked by betrayal and by the weight of obligation. The rural family life she had pictured as a refuge has become a snare, leaving her torn between the wife and mother she feels bound to be and a hunger for something far larger.

Her marriage to Ted Hughes is coming apart. The story moves through the heady early months of the couple's first summer together in Devon, even as the marriage loosens. Sylvia turns more and more to writing as a way to give shape to her pain and her loss, and also to her endurance and her strength.

She has already decided to die, but the work she produces in her final weeks will make her name, and the wider world, blaze with attention.