A personal trainer puts her abusive ex-boyfriend through his paces in a revenge tale from the author of Elizabeth Is Missing

Emma Healey’s first novel, the bestselling Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), was narrated by an elderly woman losing her memory. Her second, Whistle in the Dark (2018), told the story of a 15-year-old girl who goes missing for four days and returns refusing to speak about what happened. Sweat again focuses on a woman in peril. Cassie, the narrator, is a personal trainer who left her controlling boyfriend, Liam, two years before the start of the novel.

They initially met when Cassie attended his bootcamp classes; Liam now turns up at the gym where Cassie works, seeking to take advantage of an offer of half-price personal training sessions for those with disabilities. Liam is claiming to be blind; and though Cassie, who is assigned as his trainer, is unsure of how impaired his sight really is, she decides to pretend to be someone else and perhaps wreak some kind of revenge on him.