
ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Sweat by Emma Healey
Sweat by Emma Healey will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann on 30th January 2025 in hardcover, eBook and audiobook. My thanks to the publishers for the proof copy.
All Liam ever wanted was to help Cassie reach her full potential; to push her body to new extremes. Exercise, determination, being the optimum versions of themselves together forever. And Liam always knew what was best.
Nothing could break their intense love for one another, not Liam’s obsessive desire for physical perfection or his relentless control of every aspect of Cassie’s life. Until the day he pushes Cassie far beyond her limits, and she walks out of their flat and away from their toxic relationship for good.
Two years on and Cassie is stronger, fitter, healthier than ever before. And then she sees him – Liam – those green eyes, those stirring muscles. Something inside her flips.
But she holds the power now.
It’s Liam’s turn to sweat.
I was keen to read Sweat by Emma Healey after enjoying her previous books, Elizabeth is Missing and Whistle in the Dark. I have to say that Sweat feels like quite a different read to those books but it is absolutely gripping and hard-hitting.
This is a story of insidious coercive control and the small (and large) ways that Liam wielded this control over his girlfriend, Cassie. As the story begins, Cassie is working as a personal trainer in a gym when her ex-boyfriend, Liam, turns up as a client. But something is very different about Liam and it’s this that enables Cassie to take back some control after suffering years of Liam’s extreme behaviour, which is portrayed in flashbacks to key moments in their relationship.
This book is about another kind of control as well, control over your own body. Liam and Cassie push their bodies to the limits to try and achieve physical and inner perfection, the very image of what good health and fitness can create. It’s disturbing at times, but I also must admit to the odd rather guilty snigger too, at Cassie’s acts of revenge.
Sweat makes for uncomfortable reading and the sense of foreboding, with the benefit of Cassie’s hindsight, makes it even more so. Healey’s writing is brilliant, and overall this is a taut and intense tale of discipline, power and manipulation, which genuinely chilled me at times.
Emma Healey grew up in London and completed her first degree in bookbinding. She then worked for libraries, bookshops, art galleries and universities before studying for the MA in Creative Writing at UEA in 2010. She is the author of Whistle in the Dark, and Elizabeth is Missing, which was a Sunday Times Bestseller, won the Costa First Novel Award 2014, and was made into a BBC film starring Glenda Jackson. She lives in Norwich with her husband, daughter and cat, and regularly volunteers for Vision Norfolk with a group of visually impaired, and incredibly imaginative, creative writers.