The bestselling novelist Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot’s Wife, has died at the age of 71, after what her publisher called “a long and very private fight with cancer”.
Shreve died on 29 March at her home in New Hampshire in the US. A high-school teacher and journalist before turning to writing fiction full time, Shreve was the author of 18 novels. Her first bestseller came in 1997. The Weight of Water, about a photographer investigating the brutal murder of two Norwegian women on a New Hampshire island more than a century before, was shortlisted for the Orange prize and adapted into a film directed by Kathryn Bigelow in 2000.
After overhearing a conversation about an airplane crash at a party, Shreve wrote her 2002 novel The Pilot’s Wife, the story of a woman whose pilot husband dies in a crash, only for her to discover that he might not have been the man she thought she knew. The novel sold more than three million copies after it was selected for Oprah’s book club.
Shreve’s most recent novel was The Stars Are Fire, in which a pregnant woman tries to protect her toddlers as fire ravages the coast of Maine in 1947.
“In all of her work, Anita deftly explored the intricacies and nuances of relationships between men and women, often hinging on the ripple effects of a single, dramatic moment. She wrote the details of history, from the 19th century to the 1920s to the second world war, as if she had lived them herself,” said her publisher Hachette in a statement.
The publisher described Shreve as “a beloved figure for all of us who had the privilege of working with her”, calling her “both elegant and modest, kind, funny, and always observant of every nuance of human interaction”.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2008, Shreve described how writing was, for her, “a solitary pursuit”.
“It’s something to be kept secret, whether writing poems in my closet as a child, or refusing to tell anyone what I’m writing about until it is finished,” she said. “The well-spring of my writing is, as I have mentioned, very private. In the beginning, it was a secret pastime; later, it became a way to express emotions I had no idea what to do with … finally it morphed into its present incarnation: daydreaming with a lot of craft brought to bear on what makes it to the page.”