Review: Vivien Horler

Remain – A supernatural love story, by Nicholas Sparks with M Night Shyamalan (Sphere)

A supernatural love story? Not my usual fare.

There’s a telling exchange between the main guy, the architect Tate, and his friend Oscar.

Tate tells Oscar he’s not in a good space, and Oscar responds: “I’m guessing you and Gigi had a fight?”

Mystified, Tate responds: “Gigi?”

Oscar: “GG? Ghost Girlfriend?”

In fact the ghost girlfriend is called Wren, but other than that, Oscar is on the button.

However, if you’re looking for what is really a charming love story with a twist, as well as a whodunnit that gets pretty exciting towards the end, Remain might well do it for you.

Tate, recently released from a New York psychiatric hospital after a bout of depression following the death of his beloved sister Sylvia, heads to a small Cape Cod town to have consultations with Oscar and his wife, for whom Tate is designing a cliff-top beach house.

It’s a busy festival weekend for the town, and since all the hotels are full, Tate is booked into what had been a creaky old guest house. The house has been empty for some time, after the tragic death of the house’s heir, Wren, and is now subject to litigation.

But Oscar knows the estate trustee, and Tate has a bed. The house is looked after by a couple distantly related to Wren, and they make sure Tate is comfortable.

Despite this he has strange dreams that first night, and he wonders if the house is haunted. Downstairs the next morning he  is puzzled to find a lovely young woman doing yoga in the parlour.

Tate is a loner, a fact that worried Sylvia. She feared he would never take a chance on love, and via her widowed husband, sends him a series of pre-recorded videos to remind him to engage with people.

Fresh from having watched the first video, he does engage with the yoga woman, and is charmed. He tells her all about Sylvia, and their bond, but when the house-keeping couple knock on the front door, the woman disappears.

That night Tate hears sobbing in a hallway bathroom, but when he checks, no one is there. The next day the woman is back, doing a jigsaw puzzle at the dining table. She remains funny and utterly alluring.

Later when he describes her to the house-keeping couple, they want to know what sort of ugly prank he is playing. He’s utterly puzzled, until they tell him: the woman he has described was the owner of the house, and she died two years ago.

She drowned in the bath, they tell him, after slipping and cracking her head against the taps.

Initially bewildered, Tate comes to believe the woman – Wren – was murdered. And Oscar agrees to help him uncover the truth.

It all builds to a pretty exciting climax.

Nicholas Sparks has written 26 novels including The Notebook, with over 150 million copies of his work sold worldwide. M Night Shyamalan is an acclaimed film director, screenwriter and producer whose movies have grossed more than $3.3billion globally, and he’s known for thrillers with supernatural themes. Between them the pair know how to tell a gripping story.

At first I was dubious, but then was swept up.