Read it for her

Every book has an author. This one has two, and they did not agree.

Cassandra Mortimer was a copy-editor, and would have wanted that set down first, ahead of everything else she set down. For thirty-one years she read her husband's growing manuscript as he wrote it, and answered it in the margins: correcting his figures, questioning his sources, puncturing his certainties in a small, exact hand. She was, by her own tally and in the end by his, right on very nearly every page.

Because the book is printed exactly as it was found, you read the two of them at once. A paragraph of her husband's mounting, patient, apocalyptic certainty — and then, in the margin beside it, a single dry line that lets all the air out of the room. It is, first, very funny. It becomes, without ever seeming to try, the most moving thing in the book: a second voice running the whole length of the first, unpersuaded, precise, and unwilling to let a single conclusion pass without comment.

Which is why it is a mistake to call this a book about prophecy. It is a book about a marriage — about two people who disagreed about the largest thing there is and stayed married anyway. A woman who loved a man she believed was wrong, and told him so, on every page, for thirty-one years, and never once left the room.

“Read this one gently. It is the chapter where it begins to cost him.” Cassandra, in the margin

Their grandson had both manuscripts to choose from when he found the locked box: the clean one in her husband's hand, and the marked-up one, hers, the argument and the answers together. He published hers. In his introduction he says only this: if you read this for one thing, read it for her. We would not presume to add to it.

The God of This World is out August 4, in paperback and for Kindle.