There is so much to Elin Cullhed’s Euphoria, I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps an appropriate starting point is that I found this novel wholly absorbing.

Euphoria is an account of Sylvia Plath’s final year, marked by significant events – the birth of her second child, Nick; the publication of her first novel, The Bell Jar; and the unraveling of her marriage to Ted Hughes.

It’s gutsy, isn’t it, to write a novel about the pleasure and pain of love from the first-person perspective of Plath, when Plath herself offered exactly that through her writing? And yet, Cullhed achieves something special here. As Plath ‘describes’ her domestic life (baking, gardening, beekeeping, entertaining) with Hughes and the children on their property in Devon, the reader is given access to her increasingly anguished thoughts – pain, uncertainty and doubt invade even the most ordinary moments. Continue reading →