A Sociopath's Guide to a Successful Marriage by M.K. Oliver
Published by Atria Books
Publication date: December 30, 2025
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Humor 
Bookshop
Last week was devoted to sad summer reading—challenging, rewarding books that left me emotionally wrung out. This week I’m swinging in the opposite direction with something much more fun, beginning with: A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage by M.K. Oliver. Really, who could resist that title?
Sophie is supremely confident, intelligent, attractive, a devoted wife and mother of two…and she occasionally kills people, but only if they attack her or get in her way, of course. All she wants is a new house, for her husband Stephen to make partner at his bank, and for her daughter to be accepted into the only private school worth attending. Is that really asking too much?
Apparently it is. Stephen has no interest in making partner—or in keeping their sex life alive. They can’t afford the house Sophie is determined to buy, and her daughter is just a little too much like her mother to fit in easily. When the novel opens, Sophie has just killed a man in her kitchen while preparing for her five-year-old son’s birthday party. A minor problem once she has the time to dispose of the body. Since no one seems willing to cooperate with her plans, she does what any resourceful sociopath would do: pays the family’s French nanny to flirt with Stephen, resorts to blackmail to help her daughter, and commits fraud to secure the house. If her methods become increasingly extreme, well…needs must.
Oliver successfully adopts the acerbic, cool tones of a woman with no emotional investment in anything except her own goals and her cat. That her daughter drowned the class hamster in the sink is nothing more than a misunderstanding—she was trying to teach it how to swim! This was exactly the wry, dry detached British humor I needed. Nothing to be taken too seriously, just the absurdist machinations of a woman who knew what she wanted and would not stop at anything to get it. Go, girl power!
I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org where your purchases support local bookstores. I will earn a commission (at no cost to you) if you click through and make a purchase.
Leave a Reply