Category: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Author, Book review, Cathy Sweeney, Fiction, Ireland, Publisher, Setting, short stories, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

‘Modern Times’ by Cathy Sweeney #ReadingIrelandMonth22

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Fiction – hardcover; Weidenfeld & Nicholson; 148 pages; 2020.

This is why I love browsing in the library so much; I would not have discovered Cathy Sweeney’s Modern Times otherwise.

First published in the Republic of Ireland by Stinging Fly Press and now reissued by W&N, it is a collection of short stories with an absurdist and often risqué slant.

The suggestive cover art — designed by Steve Marking / Orion — is perfectly appropriate, for the very first story, “Love Story”, opens like this:

There was once a woman who loved her husband’s cøck^ so much that she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.

How’s that for an opening line?

Tales about taboo subjects

There are other stories that revolve around sex and love affairs and lust. Most are only a few pages long, but they are shocking, confronting and wickedly funny by turn.

In “The Birthday Present”, for instance, a woman buys her husband a sex doll called Tina for his 57th birthday and keeps it locked in the guest room for his personal entertainment. But when he dies unexpectedly, she has to keep “Tina” hidden from her adult children.

In “The Handyman” a divorcee wonders what it would be like to have sex with the handyman she invites into her semi-detached house to fix up a few things before putting it on the market, while in “A Theory of Forms” a teacher reminisces about the illicit sex she used to have with a teenage boy who had learning difficulties.

In “The Woman with too Many Mouths”, a man plans to end his affair with a woman who has two mouths — “She was, as I said, not my type” — while in “The Chair”, a married couple take it in turns to administer electric shocks as a substitute for sex:

When it is my turn to sit in the chair, I am almost relieved. In the days leading up to it I become irritable, angry, even on occasion experiencing violent ideations. Often, during this period, I think of leaving my husband, of breaking everything. But when the time comes to sit in the chair I do so without protestation. A sensation of release and expanse overtakes me, as though I am swimming effortlessly in a vast blue ocean, obeying laws of nature that are larger than me, larger than the universe.

A little bit bonkers

Not all the stories are framed around these taboo subjects. Some are truly bizarre and best described as OFF THE WALL, bonkers or just plain WIERD.

There’s a story about a palace that becomes sick evident by a “dark discolouration” spreading through the bricks at the top of its tower. Another story revolves around a manuscript that is found wrapped in newspaper and hidden behind a boiler in a house recently “vacated” by an old man. In another, a son returns from boarding school and is instructed to supervise his mother at a family celebration for fear she will get up to “her old antics, letting the whole family down”.

Out of the 21 stories in the collection, my favourite is “The Woman Whose Child Was A Very Old Man” in which an unmarried mother escaping a “dull provincial backwater” moves to a city bedsit and takes a job at a local shop. She can’t afford childcare, so while she is at work she puts her baby in the freezer and as soon as she gets home she thaws him out.

Well, human nature is human nature, and anything can become normal. Soon putting the baby in the freezer was part of the rhythm of life. There were no various side effects. The baby went into arrested development while frozen, but then caught up easily when thawed out. When the woman had a day off the baby sometimes outgrew a romper suit in an afternoon or learned to crawl in an hour.

Eventually, this pattern of freezing and growing gets out of whack, and the child grows — and ages — too quickly. And then the woman gets distracted by her new career as a writer and forgets her child in the freezer, only to return years later to find he’s become a very old man. Yes, I told you the stories were bonkers.

Wholly original

The blurb on my edition suggests that Sweeney’s stories are reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Daisy Johnson and Angela Carter, but having only read Carter’s The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault I don’t know how accurate that comparison is. They do bring to mind the genius that is Magnus Mills, perhaps because of the simple, fable-like prose in which they are written. Regardless, they are wholly original — and totally memorable.

Modern Times is a refreshing palate cleanser offering a quirky, inventive take on the short story. It is great fun to read! I hope Sweeney writes a novel next so she can give extended reign to that vivid imagination!

^ I’ve inserted a special character so my content isn’t deemed “unsafe” by search engines.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth2022. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

2021 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Niamh Campbell, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 21, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

‘This Happy’ by Niamh Campbell

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Fiction – paperback; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 311 pages; 2020.

When Alannah is 12-years-old, her father walks out on the family. A school psychologist tells her that she will always have trouble with men.

And that is essentially what Niamh Campbell’s novel This Happy is about — a young woman, now 30 years old, recounting the two most important male relationships in her life and trying to make sense of them both.

Two men six years apart

The first relationship occurred when she was 23. She fell in love with Harry, an Englishman 20 years her senior. He was married. She was studying art history in London. She gave up her student lodgings, packed her bags and visited him in Ireland where he rented a cottage in Drogheda, on the east coast where she was raised, to work on his writing, free from his wife.

The affair, which is complex and one-sided, ends abruptly after a mere three weeks but has a long-lasting emotional impact on Alannah.

Seven years later, she is now married — to someone else. Her husband, 10 years her senior, is a history teacher with ambitions to be a politician, but Alannah isn’t so sure he’s cut out for the job. She does not believe in him and feels unable to offer her unconditional support.

When one day she spies the landlady, who owned the Drogheda cottage, walking down a Dublin street, her mind turns toward Harry, her long-lost love.

She then recounts that relationship, the bliss and agony of it, and compares Harry to her now-husband, their ambitions, background and desires, and plagues herself with thoughts of what might have been with what she has now.

Style over substance

There’s no plot. The book is simply structured around Alannah’s interior thoughts and her memories. Stylistically the prose is what I would call verbose. The language is lush, ripe with metaphors and astute observations, but it feels over-written and, dare I say it, over-wrought.

This is not to say it’s a bad book. It isn’t. But you need to be in the right frame of mind to read it. You need to want to revel in the language, to soak up the words and the clever ways in which they are arranged on the page.

Much of it is about memory. About the way memory works. But it’s also about love and relationships, desire and ambition, class and privilege, how our childhoods inform our adult lives, how our expectations and beliefs can be thwarted by reality, and how if we always look back we can never look forward.

If you could dive into an old life — something you never protected when it was happening, something you believe to be a prelude at the time — if you could dive like one dives into love, or fall slowly over a precipice into it, enthralled, would you do this? Sometimes it seems like this is all I do. Like my past is a residue riming the world of the present, lying over everything. I’ve been living at speed because I know I can revisit the edited version.

But as much as I loved the honesty of the writing and the often gorgeous descriptions, I came away from the novel wondering if there was any point to the story. A newly married woman wonders if she might have had a different life with a different man isn’t that original after all.

This Happy was shortlisted for Newcomer of the Year at the 2020 An Post Irish Book Awards and has just been shortlisted for this year’s Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award, which will be announced in June.

Annabel has reviewed it too.

This is my 2nd book for the 2021 Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award and my 12th for #TBR21 in which I’m planning to read 21 books from my TBR between 1 January and 31 May 2021. I purchased it from my local independent book shop when it was published last August.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Jacqueline Woodson, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

‘Red at the Bone’ by Jacqueline Woodson

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Fiction – Kindle edition; W&N; 208 pages; 2020.

Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone came recommended to me with much fanfare. It’s been nominated for many prizes (including the Women’s Prize for Fiction), been a runaway bestseller and named as one of the books of the year in countless media outlets (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today et al).

It features everything I love in a great story: well-drawn characters, vivid prose, a strong narrative voice, thought-provoking themes (including race, class, sexuality, teen pregnancy, social mobility and ambition) and an original structure that interweaves different storylines and jumps backwards and forwards in time.

But this novella about a Black American family, told from multiple points of view, didn’t really work for me. Perhaps it didn’t help that the week I read it I was distracted by (1) the never-ending USA Presidential Election count and (2) a looming deadline for a massive project at work. Given different circumstances, I may well have found this story more engaging and immersive than I did upon my initial reading.

Melody’s family history

The story revolves around Melody, a 16-year-old about to make her coming of age debut, in 2001. She’s wearing a beautiful white dress that was made for her mother, Iris, who never got to wear it because she fell pregnant when still a schoolgirl.

As Melody descends the staircase in her grandparent’s brownstone house in Brooklyn, the time-shifting narrative explores all the interconnections in Melody’s family, detailing the personal histories of her parents and grandparents, to create an authentic portrait of an ordinary hard-working family wanting the very best for their loved ones.

He wanted Melody to never have hands like his mother’s. And maybe that was what being not poor was. They were not poor. Well, Melody wasn’t.

Red at the Bone highlights the repercussions of a teenage pregnancy on two young parents and their respective families.

It looks at how Melody’s father, Aubry, did not realise he was poor until he met Iris and got introduced to her (slightly larger) world; it shows how Iris, having birthed her daughter at 15, refused to be defined by motherhood and escaped to college to pursue a better, more ambitious life; it examines the struggles of Melody’s grandparents, Sabe and Po’Boy, who grew up in the shadow of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921; and it takes all these narrative threads and cleverly shows how the history of this one family shapes Melody’s values and world view.

It’s an ambitious story wrapped up in one neat package. It’s just a shame it didn’t quite hit the spot for me, but that’s more my fault than that of the author’s. Sometimes it’s simply a case of right book, wrong time…

I read this for Novellas in November hosted by Cathy and Bookish Becks.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2020), Alan Carter, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2020, Book review, Books in translation, crime/thriller, Fiction, Fremantle Press, Kristina Olsson, literary fiction, Publisher, Scribner, Setting, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

3 Recommended Reads: Alan Carter, Kristina Olsson and Bernhard Schlink

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The season has changed and  #20BooksOfSummer is long over, but I am a little behind in my reviewing. That’s why I’ve decided to produce this small wrap-up of the last three books I read as part of that challenge.

The three books featured here are all very different from each other, probably a good representation of my diverse taste, but they do have one thing in common: they are all set in Australia.

The trio includes a page-turning police procedural, a lush literary novel set in the 1960s and a German novel about art and dying. They are all highly recommended reads worth seeking out.

‘Heaven Sent’ by Alan Carter

Fiction – paperback; Fremantle Press; 322 pages; 2018. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Walking the streets of Fremantle, my newly adopted city, isn’t quite going to be the same having now read Alan Carter’s crime novel Heaven Sent. That’s because this gripping hard-to-guess crime tale is about a series of gruesome murders in various locations — all familiar to me — across Fremantle.

All the murders are of homeless people and the killer leaves a calling card, almost as if he is taunting the police by leaving “clues” no one quite understands. To complicate matters further, a local journalist dabbles in the investigation by communicating online with the killer as he plays a dangerous game that puts Detective Senior Sergeant Cato Kwong’s career, family and life on the line.

This is actually the fourth book in the Cato Kwong series, which began in 2010 with Carter’s debut novel, Prime Cut. I hadn’t read the previous two novels but it didn’t seem to matter, for this is a superb, intelligent crime novel, one that marries an authentic, atmospheric setting (Fremantle is renowned for its ghosts and, sadly, it’s homeless population) with a dedicated detective trying to balance his work and home life while carrying out a high-profile investigation. It’s got great pacing, is rich in detail and brims with human emotion — and humour.

‘Shell’ by Kristina Olsson

Fiction – paperback; Scribner; 374 pages; 2018. 

The controversy surrounding the construction and design of the Sydney Opera House in the 1960s forms the backdrop to Kristina Olsson’s lush literary novel Shell. Protests against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War are also raging, giving the story a rich sense of time and place.

There are two main characters: Pearl Keogh, a newspaper reporter whose involvement in the anti-war movement has led to her being banished to the women’s pages; and Axel Lindquist, a Swedish sculptor who has been commissioned to create a unique piece of work for the Opera House. The pair meet and fall in love, but this is not a typical love story.

Both have significant people missing in their lives and both are on quests to find salvation to personal problems; their romance is almost subsidiary to their individual obsessions. As a result, there is nothing ordinary about their partnership, just as there is nothing ordinary about this gently nuanced novel.

Full of exquisite imagery and the inner-most thoughts of the intelligent people at its heart, Shell unfolds slowly, but rewards the patient reader with a moving story about art, architecture and family, as well as the importance of staying true to yourself and your beliefs. I loved the way it made me slow down and pause for breath, to think about things more deeply and to experience the story’s very many layers of meaning.

‘The Woman on the Stairs’ by Bernhard Schlink

Fiction – paperback; W&N; 225 pages; 2016. Translated from the German by Joyce Hackett and Bradley Schmidt.

I love novels about art and artists, so Bernhard Schlink’s The Woman on the Stairs ticked all the right boxes for me.

But it is a book of two halves. The first reads like a psychological thriller involving the mysterious reappearance in Sydney, Australia, of a European painting (the woman on the stairs of the title) that has been considered missing for decades. The second is a more nuanced, gentler affair about caring for a terminally ill patient in unusual circumstances. How these halves come together is what makes this novel — which is essentially about three men fighting over the one woman — an unusual but compelling one.

The first person narrative, written in a dry, detached manner from the point of view of a lawyer who falls in love with the woman in the painting, gives the novel a confessional feel. I loved its themes of emotional restraint, regret, impulse and obsessions, while its short chapters and fast pace meant I raced through this in just a couple of sittings. This is a good one to read if you are looking for something a little different.

These books represent my 15th, 16th & 17th books for #20BooksofSummer / #20BooksOfSouthernHemisphereWinter. The Kristina Olsson book is my 17th book for #AWW2020

Australia, Author, Book lists, Book review, Chip Cheek, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, crime/thriller, Fiction, literary fiction, London, Mulholland Books, Non-fiction, Publisher, Rob Hunter, Sabine Durrant, Setting, true crime, USA, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

3 page-turning reads by Chip Cheek, Sabine Durrant and Rob Hunter

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Looking for a quick read, something that’s compelling and difficult to put down?

Here’s three — a literary novel, a psychological thriller and a true crime story — that I’ve read recently that may well fit the bill.

‘Cape May’ by Chip Cheek

Fiction – hardcover; W&N; 272 pages; 2019. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

This stylish and accomplished debut novel is a brilliant evocation of 1950s America (one of my favourite settings) and is highly reminiscent of Richard Yates in tone and theme with a smattering of F. Scott Fitzgerald thrown in for good measure.

It tells the story of a young couple, Henry and Effie, on honeymoon in Cape May, a seaside resort at the tip of southern New Jersey. It’s out of season and the couple appear to have the entire town and beach to themselves, but then they notice lights on in a house just down the street and find themselves drawn into the strange world of a trio of intriguing characters: Clara, a socialite; Max, her wealthy playboy lover; and Alma, Max’s aloof and pretty half-sister. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the newly married couple experience life lived on a whole new level — with numerous sailing trips, glamorous dinner parties and all-night drunken revelry — but this heady time comes at a cost, for seduction, betrayal and heartbreak await.

Compulsively readable, with great characters and snappy dialogue, Cape May begins as a sweet story of new love before it morphs into a seedy and sexually explicit tale of lust, desire and hedonism. It’s certainly not for the prudish, but as a fast-paced entertaining read — perfect for the beach or holiday — they don’t come much better than this. My only criticism, apart from the over-done sex scenes, is that the ending, charting the lives of Henry and Effie long after the honeymoon is over, feels slightly tacked on, but nonetheless this is a terrific page-turning read!

‘Under Your Skin’ by Sabine Durrant

Fiction – paperback; Mulholland Books; 320 pages; 2014.

Tautly written psychological thrillers featuring morally dubious characters don’t come much better than the ones penned by London-based writer Sabine Durrant. This is the third Durrant I’ve read (you can see previous ones here) and it certainly won’t be the last.

In Under Your Skin breakfast TV presenter Gaby Mortimer finds the body of a murdered woman lying in bushes when she is out on one of her early morning runs across Clapham Common. She does the right thing and calls the police, but later she is arrested for the crime, setting into motion a whole chain of events, which results in Gaby being hounded by the press, losing her job and then being ostracised by all who know her.

Written in the first person, present tense, the narrative moves along at a cracking pace as Gaby, a happily married middle-class working mother, tries to defend her innocence alone while her hedge fund husband heads abroad unaware of his wife’s predicament. There are lots of twists and turns in the plot and half the fun is guessing the would-be murderer — is it Gaby’s live-in nanny, her long-time stalker or one of the journalists she befriends to tell her side of the story? The denouement is suitably unexpected and shocking, making for a terrific end to a truly compelling read.

‘Day 9 at Wooreen: Kidnapped with nine Children — A True Account of the Crime that Shocked Australia’ by Rob Hunter

Non-fiction – paperback; CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 234 pages; 2018.

In 1977, not far from the small Australian town I grew up in, an entire primary school — one teacher and nine students — were kidnapped at gun point from Wooreen in South Gippsland. The kidnapper, Edwin John Eastwood, had escaped prison and carried out a similar kidnapping (of another remote one-teacher school) some five years earlier.

This audacious and shocking crime is told from the point of view of the teacher, Rob Hunter, who was nine days into his first job after finishing university. It’s a gripping and carefully written account of what would be a terrifying experience for anyone, let alone a “green” teacher with nine youngsters under his care.

Though the story is very much focused on the frightening minute-by-minute events of the two-day ordeal, Hunter weaves in his thoughts about what it is like to survive a traumatic event and how it shaped the rest of his life. He now travels to schools teaching students how to cope with their own hurts and traumas (you can read about that here).

For me, reading this book answered a lot of questions about exactly what happened and where —all the places mentioned here are totally familiar to me. And though I went to secondary school with several of the survivors, what happened to them was never something openly discussed. This book also made me realise what it must have been like for my own dad who was a teacher at a one-teacher school around the time of Eastwood’s first kidnapping: every sound of a strange car door slamming outside must have sent the safety radar into overdrive!

My copy of Day 9 at Wooreen is self-published, but I believe the book has been picked up by Wilkinson Publishing in Australia and is due for reprinting soon, but you may be able to pick up a copy via Amazon.

You can find out more about the Wooreen kidnappings via this short YouTube clip:

 

Have you read any page-turning reads lately?

Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Paraic O'Donnell, Publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

‘The Maker of Swans’ by Paraic O’Donnell

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The Maker of Swans by Paraic O'Donnell

Fiction – paperback; W&N; 336 pages; 2016.

The Maker of Swans by Paraic O’Donnell is a strange and wondrous novel that feels a bit like a Gothic fairytale. It is as enigmatic as all of the characters that dance across its pages.

There are four main characters, all of whom are as peculiar and intriguing as each other: the mysterious Mr Crowe, who lives in a grand manor house and belongs to a never-named secret society; his faithful manservant Eustace, who looks far younger than his years; Clara, a young mute girl under Eustace’s care, who communicates through writing and drawing; and the frightening academic Dr Chastern, who heads the secret society and is billed as “more dangerous than anyone else you will ever encounter”.

When the story opens, Eustace is woken in the dead of night by gunshots. Mr Crowe has apparently killed someone in the drive way of his manor house and it is up to Eustace to hide the evidence of the crime — not in order to prevent the police finding out but to hide it from members of the secret society to which Crowe belongs. “I know what this will bring,” warns Eustace. “Even if I do not understand it. They will come to know of it…They will find out, and they will come.”

And come “they” do in the form of Dr Chastern and his assistant Nazaire. It soon becomes clear that Clara is in danger, not least because she has special talents that only she is now beginning to understand herself, and the book morphs into a rather chilling escapade, the details of which I’ll refrain from mentioning for they will only serve to spoil the plot.

Evocative and exquisite prose

The Maker of Swans might sound a bit heavy but let me assure you it’s written in such beautiful, evocative and, indeed, rhapsodical, prose that it makes for an entirely enjoyable reading experience. And for every strange and frightening thing that happens in it, there is an exquisite overlay of clever humour to soften the impact. Take the following as an example.

Eustace hires two local labourers, the brothers Abel and John, to get rid of the car that the murder victim arrived in. He tries to emphasise the seriousness of their job and the importance of doing it correctly:

“In my master’s profession,” Eustace continued, “he has relied on a peculiar gift. There have been others like him, but only a handful remain. I’m not the judge of these things, but I have heard it said that none of the others could ever match him. Be that as it may, in using these gifts of his, Mr Crowe and those like him have been given great licence, but they have not acted entirely without restraint. Certain limits were placed on them by the — what might one call it? — by the order to which they belonged.”
“Order?” Abel said. “What, like monks or something?”
“Like monks?” Eustace considered this. “No, not like monks. I meant only that this order has survived for a long time. How long exactly I do not know. Centuries, at least. And it has grown powerful.”
“Vampires, then?” John said eagerly. “Like that film with what’s-his-name?”
“What?” Eustace looked upward and let out a long sigh. “No, nothing like that […]”

Bold fiction of the finest order

Interestingly, the author does not spell out everything that happens in this book — unusual, I would say, for a debut novelist — and while it’s written in a compelling manner, one that makes you keep turning the pages, not all the answers are revealed. You never find out the true nature of the secret society, for instance, nor Clara’s specific talents, but it’s these grey areas, these information vacuums, that lends the story its enigmatic flavour and allows the reader to come up with their own theories.

There’s a magic at the heart of The Maker of Swans, a kind of ephemeral power to its words. It’s very much a story about creativity and the way in which it can be harnessed and nurtured but it is cloaked in a Gothic-style mystery that makes it a distinctly original work of literature.

I’m looking forward to seeing what O’Donnell produces next — his second novel, The House on Vesper Sands, is due to be published early next year.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Gillian Flynn, Publisher, Setting, USA, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn

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Gone-Girl

Fiction – hardcover; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 416 pages; 2012.

Gillian Flynn‘s Gone Girl is one of those much-hyped books that I wasn’t sure I would like. Hence, I borrowed it from the library instead of forking out £10 for the hardcover edition. (The paperback isn’t released in the UK until next March.)

Admittedly, I wasn’t impressed when I first began reading it — it felt overwritten, too preppy and unconvincing. But when I asked the good people of Twitter whether I should continue reading, I received an avalanche of replies, mostly in the affirmative.

And I’m happy to report that I am glad I persevered. The book might not be perfect — indeed, it’s completely ludicrous in places — but it’s an enjoyable romp, with plenty of (unexpected) sharp left and right turns in the plot and a story arc that is far from conventional. In short, this is a fun, suspense-filled read.

A perfect couple

The story revolves around a seemingly perfect 30-something loved-up couple — Nick and Amy Dunne — who both lose their magazine jobs in Manhattan within a few months of each other. They move out west, to Nick’s home town in Missouri, to start afresh. Nick sets up a bar with his twin sister, Margo, and helps out his parents, both of whom are ill (his mother has cancer; his father Alzheimer’s), while Amy, who is independently wealthy, stays at home and does not very much at all.

On the surface, the couple appear happy, but behind closed doors all is not well.  And when Amy goes missing on the morning of the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary police suspicion falls on the emotionally disconnected Nick. But did he really kill his wife? And if he did so, what was the motive? And what did he do with the body?

Over the ensuing 400-plus pages, the reader is taken on a rather surreal roller-coaster journey as we follow the outfall of Amy’s disappearance and get an inside glimpse of a marriage between two very complex, needy characters full of contradictions: Nick is the perfect husband but harbours misogynistic thoughts; Amy is the dutiful only child but secretly hates the parents who dote on her.

Unreliable narrators?

The structure of Gone Girl is one of the most interesting things about this suspense novel. In alternate chapters, Nick and Amy take it in turns to tell their version of events, but it’s done in such a way that you are never quite sure which character is telling the truth and which one is lying. And just when you think you have things figured out, one of them does or says something that makes you change your mind. Nothing is entirely straightforward or clear cut.

But the novel is not perfect. Putting aside the fact that the concept of the plot is preposterous — don’t think about it too much and just go with the flow, is my advice — I found that there was little to distinguish the voices of Amy and Nick, so that I occasionally got them muddled up. It doesn’t help that Nick is not a convincing male character.

The prose also feels heavy-handed and overwritten. (On more than one occasion it reminded me of Tana French, who has the same tendency towards verbosity.) Initially, I wondered if it might simply be  a characteristic of Nick’s voice, but Amy’s voice was written in exactly the same vein so I suspect it’s just the way Flynn writes.

A masterpiece of plotting

But these are only minor criticisms. Flynn’s real strength — apart from turning the suspense/crime genre on its head — is her careful plotting and her steady drip-feed of new facts and admissions that make you constantly switch your allegiance from one character to another the further you get into the story.

Flynn is also very good at capturing modern America after the global financial crash of 2008 — most of Nick and Amy’s neighbours have defaulted on their mortgages, the local mall has gone bankrupt, hundreds of people have been laid off — and the way in which public opinion is determined by the media.

This is a fast-paced, incredibly well plotted and often surprising read. I have to admit I didn’t become truly hooked until page 144 when I was so alarmed by the turn of events I just had to keep turning the pages — and then I couldn’t stop. Gone Girl  is not exactly a pleasant read — the characters are nasty, manipulative, shallow and conniving — but it’s an addictive one.