Marta doesn’t mean to kill her husband. In fact, she hardly believes that he’s dead. After a dramatic accident leaves him drowned at the bottom of Lake Michigan, she embarks on a grief-fueled descent into the occult, and soon pulls in everyone around her, from her mother-in-law to the private detectives parked outside her home, as she tries to undo her one deadly mistake.

Peter is a young paralegal at the firm hired to investigate Marta’s role in her husband’s death, who is grappling with the recent suicide of his brother and the subsequent distance that seems to have opened between himself and the rest of the world. After learning about Marta’s case, he finds himself haunted by her story and enthralled by her. On an outing to interview her neighbors, he instead warns her that a company of private detectives is preparing to make trouble. Marta slams the door on him, but later sets up a time to hear him out. Neither Marta nor Peter could predict the consequences of their meeting.

A genre-bending story of heartache and devotion that questions where the boundaries begin and end in our closest relationships, The Diver explores the risks and rewards of intimacy, and offers a portrait of love as a catastrophic event.
 

Samsun Knight is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is also an economist and assistant professor in the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.