SUDDENLY by Isabelle Autissier

This intense book was exhausting to read, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was fiction.  Louise and Ludovic enjoy a months-long sailing trip and decide to explore a remote island on which visitors are forbidden.  A violent storm comes up, and the unthinkable happens.  Actually, it is quite imaginable, given the circumstances, but Louise and Ludovic are ill-prepared for it, in either experience or equipment.  This pair is deeply in love, but they could not be more different in temperament or stature.  Ludovic is tall, handsome, charming, affable, dangerously optimistic, and has zero common sense.  Louise, although a very petite woman, is an experienced climber, and she knows when the conditions dictate caution.  Despite being the sensible one of the two, she yields to Ludovic, frequently against her better judgment, with life-threatening results.  At one point she makes every effort to do what obviously needs to be done, but he thwarts her with his own ill-conceived, impossible plan.  She ultimately faces a moral dilemma and makes a fateful decision that is her decision alone, in order to maximize the chance of survival.  This decision is the crux of the entire plot, and I would argue that she makes the right one.  However, her actions afterward are hard to endorse.  Even when she later grapples with guilt about the decision, I don’t believe that she ever confronts the horrific and selfish mistake she makes afterward.