Behind Her Eyes Book Summary

Louise has been a single mother since her marriage ended. She works for a psychiatry practice and her life is quiet and slightly stuck. On a rare night out, she meets David at a bar. They connect quickly and kiss before parting. The next day, David walks into her office as the new psychiatrist she will be working for. Neither of them acknowledges what happened. David is married.

Louise runs into Adele outside a gym and they begin talking. Adele is elegant, warm, slightly lost — she has no friends in London and has clearly been isolated. They bond over coffee and the friendship deepens, meeting regularly without telling David. Adele teaches Louise a technique for controlling nightmares — a method of lucid dreaming that Adele learned years ago from a young man named Rob, whom she knew at a rehabilitation clinic after a fire that killed her parents.

Meanwhile, Louise and David have begun an affair. Louise tries to manage the guilt of being close to both of them, while noticing that Adele seems afraid of David in ways she cannot explain — and that David speaks of Adele with a controlled intensity that is not entirely like concern.

Adele's diary entries, set years earlier, show a young woman devastated by the deaths of her parents, confined to a rehabilitation clinic, and forming a deep attachment to Rob, a recovering addict. Rob teaches Adele to "astral project" — to move her consciousness out of her body and inhabit other places while asleep. The diary presents this as real rather than metaphorical.

As the present-day narrative accelerates, Louise becomes increasingly unsettled by both relationships. David's behavior toward Adele seems controlling and frightening. Adele seems to know things she should not. Louise finds that she cannot quite piece together what is true.

The novel's ending is the reason Behind Her Eyes became a cultural conversation. The following contains major spoilers.

Adele's diary reveals the full truth: years earlier, Rob learned astral projection from Adele and became obsessed with it. Rob, who was dying from drug addiction and deeply jealous of Adele's wealth and stability, used astral projection to switch bodies with Adele while they were both projected. Rob killed Adele's body — which now housed Rob's consciousness — in the fire at their clinic, and walked away in Adele's body with Adele's life, identity, and money. "Adele" has been Rob all along.

Rob-as-Adele has been manipulating Louise throughout the novel. Having learned about the astral projection technique from the diary entries she taught Louise to practice, Rob-as-Adele uses their deep connection to switch bodies with Louise — trapping Louise's consciousness in Adele's body, which Rob then kills. Rob walks away in Louise's body and — in the novel's final lines — is welcomed by Louise's son Adam, who calls him "Mum." The novel ends as David marries "Louise," not knowing that the woman he loves is neither of the women he knew.

Sarah Pinborough's prose in Behind Her Eyes is clean and controlled — the voice of a writer who knows exactly how much to reveal and when.

"Everyone has secrets, Lou. Everyone should be allowed their secrets. You can never know everything about a person. You'd go mad trying to."

"It's strange how different we all appear to who we really are."

"Sharing a secret always feels great in the moment, but then becomes a burden in itself. That gnawing in the pit of your stomach that something has been set free and you can't call it back and now someone else has that power over your future."