What does success mean to you? And what woud you do to achieve it?

The Rayburn Affair is a psychological thriller about friendship, ambition and power. This novel is at its best when it leans into the uncomfortable, murky territory where all three collide.

Ruth is a university researcher on a tenure track who fancies herself more an author than a scholar. When she meets Shelby Rayburn, a famous and celebrated novelist, and her husband Oscar, a slightly less celebrated photographer with a megalomaniacal streak, she is immediately drawn into their orbit. The pull is intoxicating: "There were other people like her in the world, and they were here. Belonging, acceptance, reassurance — they were intoxicating." The friendship between Ruth and Shelby drives the novel forward and provides most of its tension. Shelby hasn't published anything new in a while and feels the pressure. Ruth wants what Shelby has. It doesn't take long before literary success drives a wedge between them.

A significant thread running through the novel is Ruth's field of research: artificial intelligence. Petrou uses this to explore a question that haunts the entire book: what does authorship actually mean? "So much of art was process. When the process was removed, when the effort was pressing enter, something was irretrievably lost." It's one of the most interesting things the novel does, and it circles back into the friendship in ways I won't spoil, except to say that Ruth's relationship with her own work will make you wince.

The novel plays a subtle game of perception. Ruth, an at times shallow and unlikable main character, sees Shelby as powerful and untouchable: "People like Shelby and Oscar weaponized their talent and confidence; their refusal to lose eye contact, to cede, was a kind of superpower that Ruth simply did not have." But Shelby's own chapters tell a different story. She is deeply insecure, dreading public performances, hungry for validation: "Shelby's heart, head and ego swelled. She felt alive again." The contrast is effective, though I felt Petrou was a little too fond of Shelby. Her motivations are elaborately explained and she is too readily excused.

I do have to be honest about the first hundred pages: they are slow. The characters took a long time to come alive for me, and the prose has a tendency to over-illustrate its points. Push through it. Because the second half of this book is genuinely gripping. There is a haunted quality to the story, things brewing beneath the surface, and the characters get so lost in their own narratives that you almost forget to keep your footing too. The power play between Ruth and Shelby is ice cold and very real.

If you loved Conversations with Friends but wanted more tension and darker stakes, this one is for you.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.