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.
 

On a summer evening in the 1990s, Anne learns that one of her husband’s lovers is expecting his child, only a few weeks after learning that she too is pregnant. He tells her casually, as if it’s just another colorful story about his day. And the tenuous understanding between them—the careful balance of privacy and flexibility that has sustained their open marriage to date—is shattered.

Meanwhile, Sandy, the lover, works to find her own path forward through her surprise pregnancy and all the million tiny miracles and catastrophes that she must now navigate, often entirely on her own. Searching through diaries and grocery lists and seances with the dead, Sandy tries to remember just enough of her original sense of direction to make her own way home.