What's Left of Me Is Yours: A Novel by Stephanie Scott (A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE DAILY MAIL AND WOMAN AND HOME)

A gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime, for readers of Everything I Never Told You and The Perfect Nanny, What's Left of Me Is Yours charts a young woman's search for the truth about her mother's life--and her murder.

In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the "wakaresaseya" (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Satō hires Kaitarō, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Satō has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitarō's job is to do exactly that--until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitarō fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter's life.

Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Stephanie Scott exquisitely renders the affair and its intricate repercussions. As Rina's daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother's story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession.

Product details

    Language ‏ : ‎ English
    ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1474610889
    ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1474610889
    Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
    Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.28 x 1.18 x 8.43 inches

    Customer Reviews: 4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 573 ratings

Review

A New York Times 'Editor's Pick'
One of the Observer's Ten Best Debut Novelists of 2020
Shortlisted for the Author's Club First Novel Award
Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize
Longlisted for the CWA John Creasy New Blood Dagger


“Scott deftly exposes how life-limiting even the most well-intentioned lies can be, especially for women in a society that remains as patriarchal as Japan’s. . . For the outsider, What’s Left of Me Is Yours is an extraordinary window onto [Japanese] culture. . . Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion. Yet Scott’s subject remains vast: the idea that the law itself does not protect the innocent, and ‘that what matters most is knowledge – of ourselves and others.’”—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"Mesmerizing"—LOS ANGELES TIMES

About the Author
Stephanie Scott is a Singaporean and British writer who was born and raised in South East Asia. She read English Literature at York and Cambridge and holds an M.St in Creative Writing from Oxford. Scott was awarded a BAJS Toshiba Studentship for her anthropological work on her novel What's Left of Me Is Yours and has been made a member of the British Japanese Law Association as a result of her research. What's Left of Me Is Yours was named a Brooklyn Book Festival Debut of the Year and a Guardian / Observer Best Debut of 2020. She is based in Singapore and London.