What Came Before

What Came Before is a literary thriller by the Australian writer Anna George, published in 2014. It opens with a confession and then spends the rest of the book examining how the man making it arrived at that point.

David James Forrester is a solicitor. He sits in his car, sick to his stomach and barely able to order his thoughts, and records his statement of events: that tonight, at 6.10, he killed his wife. Elle hovers over her own body where it lies on the laundry floor of the house they shared, and she looks back too.

The novel traces the relationship in both directions. David remembers what it was like when the marriage was intimate and passionate, and what accumulated around it afterwards; Elle's version of the same years gradually shows how badly she misjudged the man she had loved. The two accounts run alongside each other, and the statement he is recording in his car is the question the whole book has to answer. Neither of them is a reliable witness, and the novel allows both versions to stand.