The Wreck

by Lizzy Stewart

'Satisfyingly detailed and juicy... an utter treat' Amy Liptrot

'A tender and wise portrait of love and friendship that ponders with an astonishingly light touch big questions to do with who we are and how we live. She’s done it again!' Chloë Ashby

Two couples pursue their dream of communal living in the English countryside – and then it all comes tumbling down, in this stunning new illustrated novel from the prize-winning author of Alison

Charlotte and Francesca were best friends at university in the mid-1970s. But tensions coursed beneath their natural affection, deepening when Fran got together with Charlotte’s friend Adrian, and the two women drifted apart.

When Fran contacts Charlotte out of the blue with an unusual proposal – an invitation to live with her and Adrian in the rambling house they’ve bought in the countryside – Charlotte impulsively persuades her partner, Bill, to accept this tantalising promise of a new kind of community.

At first their new life feels utopian; life and space are shared joyfully. But it doesn’t take long for old tensions to rise to the surface, shattering their illusions and showing each of them in a new light.

The Wreck is a glorious genre-defying illustrated novel about the messy tangle of love, envy and desire that underpins our most precious relationships, and the difficult paths we must take to discover our true selves.

'No other writer or artist can pinpoint the queasy interdependence of class and the arts in England with such nauseous accuracy, only to pull the rug out from under us with tenderness' Joanna Walsh

'I fell hopelessly in love with The Wreck... A beautiful, funny, clever, insightful book' Lisa Owens

'A one-of-a-kind novel. I adored every page of it' Ana Kinsella

Genres: Graphic Novels, Fiction, Comics, British Literature, Marriage

323 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 9, 2026

About the author

Lizzy Stewart is a British illustrator and author currently based in London. She has written and illustrated various books for children and adults. Her debut full-length illustrated novel Alison was published in 2022. She teaches illustration at Goldsmiths University and has also taught courses on behalf of the National Portrait Gallery.

Reviews

[Claire Fuller]

Just the perfect combination of words and pictures - a graphic novel but also with lots of text which I delighted in lingering over. Lizzy Stewart is so good at capturing human emotion through both drawing and writing.
The Wreck is about two couples: Charlotte and Bill, and Fran and Adrian who in the 1980s decide to test the idyllic dream of living communally in a big house in the English countryside. For a summer their lives are perfect, until they aren't.
Another contender for my books of the year!

[Moira Macfarlane]

Twee stellen jagen hun droom na om samen op het Engelse platteland in een groot landhuis te wonen – en dan valt alles uit elkaar.

Graag gelezen, deze graphic novel die net zoveel een tekstgeschreven roman als een graphic novel is. Er gebeurt niet veel in, niet in de zin van grootste dingen of een plot en dat vond ik heerlijk. Het was slow reading op zijn best, zo fijn om telkens als ik uit mijn werk kwam een kop thee te zetten, op de bank te kruipen en de wereld van deze vier vrienden weer binnen te stappen en een stukje verder te kunnen lezen.

Ik hou van Lizzy Stewarts werk, haar rustige manier van bewegen door de wereld van de door haar gecreëerde personages en hoe ze dat in beeld weet te vangen. Haar tekeningen, een beetje schetsachtig, zachte lijnen en kleuren in aquarel, zonder toeters of bellen, gewoon heel fijn.

'There were endings everywhere. Is this the bind of great good fortune? Does joy come parcelled up with the knowledge of the end of joy?'

Voor een inkijkje: https://www.instagram.com/p/DcnQJ_fiO...

[Emma]

It's felt like a while since I've really loved a new (or soon to be published) book, so The Wreck felt like a complete breath of fresh air. I can't remember the last time a book had me so excited to get back to it, and I will be amazed if this isn't one of my books of the year by the end of 2026!

Part novel and part graphic novel, The Wreck is the story of four friends, two couples, who in the 1980s decide to try living together in their forties in a big countryside house - a utopia of sorts. As they each find a way to live together, some easier than others, they create a wonderful existence together that makes you wonder why more people don't do this. But of course, tensions and feelings soon erupt and the bubble bursts.

I loved the way Lizzy Stewart carefully crafted each character. All four of them felt distinct to me, and you could really grasp how and why each of them were feeling the way that they did. The way class, ambition, happiness, creativity mean something different to them all. I thought it explored friendship with such honesty - the way we compare ourselves, the need to impress, but also the drive they can create in you to fulfil your ambitions. Also just the sheer joy of having those few friends who know you almost inside out, the kind of friendships that are almost impossible to recreate as a fully fledged adult.

I loved Lizzy's beautiful drawings equally as much as the prose, and found The Wreck to be such a wonderful reading experience. I already have her previous graphic novel, Alison, lined up to read. I hope The Wreck gets all the praise it deserves in 2026!

[Bert]

Is this the perfect coffee table book? I don't know.
(No trendy interiors, no luxurious handbags, no artworks or stylish coffee brands.)
But I want it to stay on my coffee table.

Is this an ideal present? Probably not.
(What a message are you giving with a story about two couples messing everything up.)
But I want to give it to everyone.

Is this my little treasure? It is.
(Like a hot chocolate you treat yourself to on a rainy day.)
And I want it to be yours as well.

[Amy Moss]

weeping, weeping

[Brendan Ng]

Living communally with your friends in adult life, in the english countryside. Sign me up.

Mostly graphic novel, but with some substantive text sections as well. The illustrations were great and the story I really see as a story of friendship between two women, with some other things thrown in.

[Jacqueline]

Tore through this. Can't remember the last time a graphic novel (or illustrated novel, I guess) brought me to tears. The last few pages are heart wrenching. Charlotte is so real to me that at first I thought this was a memoir. Lizzy Stewart is a powerhouse.

[Chloe]

Loved this! A perfect mix of words and images that made the read so engaging, with characters that felt warm and human in every way and a story that was quietly compelling.

[Sarah Brown]

I loved Lizzy Stewart’s first graphic novel, Alison, soooo much and I was really looking forward to this one. I was not disappointed! The art and the prose complement each other perfectly, it is very cleverly done and I found it totally immersive. The story reads like memoir, it is so well drawn. I dont think the plot was as strong as Alison, the main crisis point happens roughly in the middle of the book, and I lost momentum a bit in the second half. The ending is perfect though.

[Leeza]

FIVE STARS AMAZING

[Lauren Putt]

This was a beautifully illustrated book and I loved the characters. The plot let it down slightly as I found myself losing interest as the story went on. But overall, I would still recommend it!

[Kerry]

Seamless. Lizzie Stewart is a masterful storyteller, her talent is in telling the lives of her characters, making them real and knowing the small details that can expose a person. I knew from reading ‘Alison’ that this would stop me in my tracks. Thoroughly recommend.

[Ca3nea]

What a treat of a book!
As gorgeous, thoughtful and entertaining as Alison, the two books also share themes (art, friendship, class) and that delightful mix of words and pictures that Stewart masters.
Perfect for reading in one sitting (bonus points if in the garden)

[diamond]

this reader will pick up whatever Lizzy Stewart puts out. except this time I made it our bookclub pick 🥳

[Emmy]

What a fascinating way to tell a story. 4.5 ⭐️

[Wendy Greenberg]

I knew I would adore this book and indeed I did!

At first it seems to be a graphic novel but I would describe as more of an illustrated novel with the most atmospheric pen and ink drawings along with full page water colour illustrations that gleefully litter the slow-burn story of two co-habiting couples. Three of them friends from Bristol University in the 1970s and one a Canadian carpenter.

As a result of this unique style of presenting a narrative, the pacing is so different from either a novel or a comic strip and forces to pause and think about what they are reading and seeing. The illustrations all deserve far more than a fleeting glance. The text is a serious, slice of life, examination of putting friendships under the microscope as they live the lives we often imagine "What would it be like if we all lived in a house together?". There are moments of a bohemian nirvana and the reality of sharing space, working and living in such close proximity.

All four characters are observed and built to form such rounded characters whose decisions, successes, failures, self-knowledge wax and wane. Because we see each of them through the other characters' eyes, the book provides a truly intimate perspective.

How perfect!

[lucy black]

The protagonist is unlikeable, self involved and has a massive chip on her shoulder. Lizzy Stewart follows her life through university, the friends she makes and is reunited with in their 40s. Somehow the bitter MC Charlotte makes a lovely best friend Fran and nabs a lovely boyfriend Bill. Successful Fran invites stagnant Charlotte and Bill to join her and her husband in their country house and try communal living, of course it all goes to shit. The Wreck has a fascinating premise but it slightly drags. Stewart tells the story with a mix of novel text and then pages of graphic novel panels, it defines should have been a straight graphic novel, we didn’t the extra text. Although it gave Stewart more room to explore the characters feelings in depth I think the she should have trusted the reader to intuit those from the images.

[Peony Gent]

Loved this! Such a good combination of comics/drawing/prose and full of complex beautifully written characters. Many deeply relatable sections that made me feel very SEEN!!

[Kit Nevile]

Truly beautiful, a shimmering example of just how powerful the interlacing of prose and illustration can be.

A treasure of a novel.

[Caroline Roseberry]

I am, fittingly, a complete wreck after finishing ‘The Wreck’. Reading it felt like pushing on a bruise: it’s painful, but you keep returning to it, chasing the ache.

In ‘The Wreck’, Lizzy Stewart explores some really painful emotions, like jealousy, insecurity, and resentment, some of them justified — like the protagonist Charlotte’s experience of class difference and sexism — and some of them a bit uglier: Charlotte’s envy of her friends’ seemingly easy lives, her youthful and shame-filled confusion and longing towards her best friend’s husband, Adrian, and a growing resentment and bitterness that she notices but can’t stop. It’s uncomfortable, but completely compulsive, and I just couldn’t stop reading.

The emotions laid bare on the pages, in immaculate prose and hand drawn watercolor, are both recognizable and intensely familiar — perhaps that’s why this book feels so powerful. Stewart is unflinching, laying bare every ugly feeling stored inside her protagonist; and I felt myself split open and seen, too. Who hasn’t felt young and overlooked, wanting to be special, watching others have an easy time of it while you struggle to fit in? It’s vulnerable and nostalgic in equal measure, and I felt completely swallowed by the book.

Also, I know it’s a novel about an affair, but MY GOD can this woman write female friendships! I was deeply moved by the final section, which moves into Francesca’s perspective. After being carried through the affair narrative, you expect her section to be the portrait of a wronged woman; but I was shocked and delighted to find instead one of enduring warmth, respect and, yes, longing towards her once best friend, even long after the affair blew up their friendship. I don’t know why I expected anything less — the clues are in Stewart’s previous works, ‘Alison’ and ‘It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be’, both of which are *so* good on ambivalent and enduring female friendships; but I was impressed, all the same, by her generosity and the freshness of her portrayal of this gorgeous, messy friendship.

That final panel, in which the two women run into each other in the street after 20 years apart, had me in tears; whoever said that friendships can’t be as bruising and confusing and sustaining and frustrating and beautiful as romantic relationships has never read a Lizzy Stewart graphic novel.

What a gift.

[Nicola Smith]

Reading an illustrated novel is really unusual for me, in fact I think I’ve only read two graphic novels before (both by Audrey Niffenegger if you’re interested). What drew me to The Wreck is that it is a combination of written and graphic elements, the written being the story and the graphic the dialogue, which gave me a real sense of the characters.

Those characters are Charlotte and Bill, Francesca and Adrian. Charlotte, Fran and Adrian were friends at university in the 1970s but over the years had drifted apart, partly due to Fran and Adrian getting together, and later getting married, which kind of fractured the friendship with Charlotte. Twenty years later Fran gets in touch with Charlotte with an unexpected and surprising proposal: that Charlotte and Bill move into Fran and Adrian’s large house in the country, known as The Wreck, and embrace a kind of communal living.

I enjoyed The Wreck so much. It’s a large book so I have been reading a little every evening and I always very much looked forward to picking it up. The story itself is engrossing, told for the first three parts from Charlotte’s perspective and then in the last part from Fran’s. It takes the reader back to the university days, setting the scene for all that was to come, the old friendships and the new ones, and life at the Wreck. At first life is really good but there was a sort of inevitability to the outcome I think.

The illustrations are absolutely stunning. Lizzy Stewart is a brilliant artist and I got to truly know the characters through her art, each one so perfectly drawn and which put me right there with them at the Wreck. I took a bit of a chance on this book, it being something different for me, and I’m so glad that I did. In fact, I’ve now bought Stewart’s first illustrated novel, Alison. I highly recommend The Wreck; it’s a captivating and pleasing written and visual experience.

[Peter Brown]

I was reminded a little of Posy Simmonds, though without her comic-melodramatic exuberance. The characters, with one exception, belong to the upwardly mobile middle classes, although their backgrounds and careers create significant differences between them.

I found the implied shifts between photography and drawn illustration an area deserving closer consideration. The distinctions between action and acting, seeing and telling, reporting and remembering create a complex set of relations that shapes both the characters and the narrative. Because the reader encounters these relationships at one remove, the process becomes doubly complex, with much to absorb and interpret. Do text and image necessarily tell us the same thing, backing one another up, or do they offer subtly different accounts? The latter, I think: the continual interplay of hiding and showing keeps the narrative unsettled.

The illustrations generally employ darker hues, but every so often a full page blazes into colour. They (the full page illustrations) partly reminded me of Raymond Briggs—I think it may be the hair—and once each of Francis Bacon’s bed paintings and Egon Schiele with the coloration of ‘Group of three girls’ (1911) albeit title wise ‘Two girls lying entwined’ (1915) would be more apt.

‘The Wreck’—and what is contained in that title?—would make for an unusually rewarding book-club discussion. It might be especially productive if four readers agreed beforehand to concentrate on one of the four principal characters, since each appears to inhabit a distinct version of the same emotional terrain.

“Ben Reads Good” has tipped it for the Booker longlist. Indeed—and why not?

[Lauren]

4.25 stars

I really enjoyed my time reading The Wreck and kept telling myself to only read 20-30 pages a day (which of course didn't happen). I find Lizzy Stewart's work incredibly compelling and despite guessing what was going to happen quite early on in the story, this never dampened my enjoyment or made me want to put it aside. If anything, it made me ravenous for more and want to know how everything was going to end.

I do think for the best reading experience that you should just read the very short blurb and head straight in - that's what I did and it worked well for me :)

The illustrations were lovely and showcased Stewart's signature style (I'm recalling another one of her books here - Alison, which is also brilliant) and I appreciated the "extra" narrative we got through the massive chunks of text throughout.

I will say, my one slight critique was that this book did contain a LOT of words (probably the most I've ever encountered in a graphic novel which did make me think at times, it was more of a novel with illustrations) and in some instances, I don't think we needed all this text - I'm certain a few more illustrations would have accurately conveyed some of these huge paragraphs.

Also, just a heads up - this story does follow a lot of unlikeable and flawed characters - the only character I genuinely liked all the way through was Bill (for obvious reasons - talk about golden retriever); the others were pretty frustrating/infuriating but I think that accurately depicts most people so...

That being said, it was still a hugely compelling and immersive read, and I appreciated where Stewart chose to end this. Would definitely recommend.

[Jamad]

The Wreck is an unusual hybrid of novel and graphic novel, following two couples whose long, complicated friendship stretches from their university days in the 1970s to an experiment in communal living in the English countryside decades later. Old rivalries, buried resentments, class differences and unfulfilled ambitions gradually undermine what initially appears to be an idyllic arrangement, until the dream inevitably begins to fall apart.

This was my first proper venture into the graphic novel genre and, having dipped my toes in the water, I can safely say it isn’t for me.

Lizzy Stewart is clearly a talented illustrator, but I never felt the drawings added anything to the story. If anything, they kept pulling me out of it. Rather than becoming immersed in the novel, I found myself flicking between text and artwork in a way that reminded me of reading comics as a child.

For me, one of the great pleasures of reading a well-written novel is that the words become pictures in your own mind. Every reader imagines the characters, the settings and the emotions slightly differently. Here, those images were supplied for me, and I realised I would much rather have created them myself.

The story itself has potential, but I never connected with it because the format constantly distracted me. That’s not really a criticism of Stewart’s abilities as either a writer or an artist; it’s simply that I’ve discovered graphic novels are not my thing.

Sometimes a book teaches you something unexpected. In this case, it taught me that I don’t like graphic novels.

[Eileen]

I don't usually like books with infidelity central to the plot, but this graphic novel is brilliant in the ways it focuses on the appeal and difficulty of friendship between the women. It's quite text heavy for a graphic novel, but not in a bad way since it isn't jammed into the drawn panels. I liked the insights into human nature, the way Charlotte tries to escape her mother's talent for astute criticism but has internalized it. She and Fran never quite get past the class divide and envy of each other's strengths. Aiden's self destructiveness feels real and his refusal to perform for Charlotte when she wants a portrait photograph as loving as the ones he took of his wife is brutal and feels true. Poor Bill. Including a Canadian golden retriever of a man actually makes it possible to imagine the two couples living together happily for a while. I was surprised by the shorter section of Francesca's point of view at the end but it worked. Her take on Charlotte's inaccurate image of herself and dissatisfaction with her life really landed. I also liked a description of herself that included the idea of 'a foundational grudge' how it became 'a load-bearing wall of her personality'. I feel that. I wasn't terribly drawn to the art style but appreciate the choice to lean into the ordinariness of the characters' appearance at various ages. It's a welcome change from the exaggerated sexiness of so many graphic novels. I want to read more from this author.

(Swansea Library)

[davidovitch]

Ravishingly illustrated and written with care and elegance, this tale of dysfunctional friendships and unorthodox living arrangements across the decades was incredibly evocative and I frequently found it quite moving. I loved the format, it feels like a proper novel, but the illustration takes it to another level.

So why only 3 stars (honestly, why doesn't Goodreads to 1/2 stars - I'd say this was a 3.5)? I think it's because the story itself felt a little predictable and I guess I was hoping that The Wreck cohabiting situation itself would throw up some more interesting scenarios. I almost found myself being a little disappointed by the characters. Exactly what you thought would happen happened, and their responses were quite, well, dull. I'm not suggesting I wanted some kind of polyamorous romp, I was just hoping their emotional journey might go in a more enlightening or surprising direction.

Still, I enjoyed the format, particularly the illustrations, and I'd broadly recommend.

[Hannah_Grace14]

“The wreck” by Lizzy Stewart is formatted as part graphic novel and part written work and that is what drew me to the book- It executes this concept brilliantly and the artworks are incredible.
While this is by no means the best book I’ve ever read the premise of its presentation excited me and I’m glad I read it as it felt like a very new and interesting experience.
If you’re looking for something a little different to usual, I’d definitely recommend this!
4 stars

[Rich]

I’m a graphic novel kinda person, but more of The Sandman style than The Wreck. I’ve been trying to branch out my reading choices so this story intrigued me about two couples communally living.

It bobs along fine but really picks up after the major incident and then into the aftermath. I really enjoyed the years later perspective which wasn’t from the main character.

[Jua]

Ouch. I typically reach for graphic novels with the expectation of wonderful illustrations and a fun story. This book blew me away. It was beautiful, sharp and brazenly honest. It’s left me with a pain in my chest and i’m okay with that. 100/10!!!!

[Melissa Malone]

Lizzy Stewart is a visionary. What a wonderful format!
Her drawings are so delicate and I loved the breathing space between passages where you’re suddenly confronted with gorgeous full colour illustrations. Her work is sensitive, contemporary and fresh.