Apple Tree Yard: From the writer of BBC smash hit drama 'Crossfire'

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From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. It may seem strange that she would risk all this for illicit sex with a stranger who won't even tell her his name, but little by little, it becomes clear that neither her work nor marriage are as perfect as they seem. A surprisingly original and disturbing novel about a woman who embarks on an affair with disastrous consequences. I found out as Yvonne told her story, a mixture of recollections and letters to her lover that she would never send.

The who, how and why of her presence in Old Bailey, the United Kingdom’s central criminal court, is spun out masterfully by Louise Doughty over the next 300 pages. Yvonne Carmichael has a high-flying career, loving husband and 2 children but jeopardises it all by having an affair starting in Apple Tree Yard near parliament.Apple Tree Yard follows the story of Carmichael, a conflicted, moderately unhappily-married fifty-something scientist, who begins a covert yet flagrant affair with Costley whilst completely unaware of his background. She knows exactly how to portray a person who spirals into obsessive relationships, and she has perfected the look of a woman who has drifted out of her own body and is looking on in horror at her own actions. But in the days to come, she becomes obsessed with finding her random lover again, and succeeds in doing so. She wanted someone to look at her – not as wife, not as a mother, not as a professional – but as an interesting, attractive woman.

We both know we are about to lose everything - our marriages are over our careers are finished, I have lost my son's and daughter's good regard, and more than that, our freedom is at stake. But she also uses the model of the genome to explain how the small, consoling fictions we tell ourselves build up into complex patterns of deceit: “It is human nature to let people think that we are something more glamorous than we are.He was so obviously a serial adulterer who was taking advantage of her, and it infuriated me that she couldn't see that or if she could, that she didn't care. They end up having sex, in a broom cupboard (Boris Becker-style, although this broom cupboard has a more distinguished history than the one in Nobu); it is where the suffragette Emily Davison once hid overnight so she could put down her address as the House of Commons in the census. And it is there the course of her life changes, as she suddenly finds herself, along with her lover, on trial for murder. Although I didn’t feel much of a bond with it, or with Carmichael – in spite of Watson’s excellent performance. Yvonne is the first person narrator of this story, sometimes through letters she types on her computer but never sends but more often courtesy of an inner monologue.

Actually, make Yvonne the grandmother, because that’s marginally less seedy, and she is just about to become a granny – her daughter announces she’s pregnant. She is, we will learn, so expert and well respected in her field that she is invited to speak at parliamentary select committees. Yvonne didn’t want to tell her husband – she couldn’t without telling him about her affair – and she tried to cope alone.And then something horrendous happens that shifts everything into high gear and inexorably links their fates. She is an intelligent woman, has two grown children, and has a comfortable yet somewhat lackluster long-term marriage.