ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart

Posted on 19th May 2026 By Nicola

The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart is published by Jonathan Cape is and out now. My thanks to Vintage Influencers for the review copy.

Two couples pursue their dream of communal living in the English countryside – and then it all comes tumbling down

Charlotte and Francesca were best friends at university in the mid-1970s. But tensions coursed beneath their natural affection, deepening when Fran got together with Charlotte’s friend Adrian, and the two women drifted apart.

When Fran contacts Charlotte out of the blue with an unusual proposal – an invitation to live with her and Adrian in the rambling house they’ve bought in the countryside – Charlotte impulsively persuades her partner, Bill, to accept this tantalising promise of a new kind of community.

At first their new life feels utopian; life and space are shared joyfully. But it doesn’t take long for old tensions to rise to the surface, shattering their illusions and showing each of them in a new light.

The Wreck is a glorious genre-defying illustrated novel about the messy tangle of love, envy and desire that underpins our most precious relationships, and the difficult paths we must take to discover our true selves.

Reading an illustrated novel is really unusual for me, in fact I think I’ve only read two graphic novels before (both by Audrey Niffenegger if you’re interested). What drew me to The Wreck is that it is a combination of written and graphic elements, the written being the story and the graphic the dialogue, which gave me a real sense of the characters.

Those characters are Charlotte and Bill, Francesca and Adrian. Charlotte, Fran and Adrian were friends at university in the 1970s but over the years had drifted apart, partly due to Fran and Adrian getting together, and later getting married, which kind of fractured the friendship with Charlotte. Twenty years later Fran gets in touch with Charlotte with an unexpected and surprising proposal: that Charlotte and Bill move into Fran and Adrian’s large house in the country, known as The Wreck, and embrace a kind of communal living.

I enjoyed The Wreck so much. It’s a large book so I have been reading a little every evening and I always very much looked forward to picking it up. The story itself is engrossing, told for the first three parts from Charlotte’s perspective and then in the last part from Fran’s. It takes the reader back to the university days, setting the scene for all that was to come, the old friendships and the new ones, and life at the Wreck. At first life is really good but there was a sort of inevitability to the outcome I think.

The illustrations are absolutely stunning. Lizzy Stewart is a brilliant artist and I got to truly know the characters through her art, each one so perfectly drawn and which put me right there with them at the Wreck. I took a bit of a chance on this book, it being something different for me, and I’m so glad that I did. In fact, I’ve now bought Stewart’s first illustrated novel, Alison. I highly recommend The Wreck; it’s a captivating and pleasing written and visual experience.

Lizzy Stewart is an author based in London. She writes and illustrates books for both children and adults. In 2017 her picture book There’s a Tiger in the Garden won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and a World Illustration Award. Her debut full-length novel Alison was published in 2022. She teaches Illustration at Goldsmiths, University of London and has also taught courses at the Tate and on behalf of the National Gallery.