The Cliff House by Chris Brookmyre – twisty locked room thriller on a remote Scottish island ★★★★

Jen is getting married again and has somewhat surprised herself by arranging a hen party with six friends. Having recently come into some money, she’s gone all out and booked for the prenuptial celebrations to take place at the secluded Clachan Geal, a private Scottish island home to a retreat for Victorian aristocracy, priding itself on ‘splendid isolation’ and all mod cons. She’s not quite sure she actually wants to marry Zaki, her fiancé, but decides to push any doubts to the back of her mind for the weekend.

Of course, in true psychological thriller fashion, none of the group are quite who they seem. Along for the ride with Jen is Helena, a childhood friend and embittered ex-bandmate of Michelle, another schoolfriend who is now a famous solo singer with a recently leaked sex tape. Nicolette is a fashionista with a supposedly glamorous career whose marriage is falling apart. Beattie is Jen’s ex-sister-in-law, permanently disapproving (particularly of Jen’s remarriage) and habouring terrible guilt over a recent accident. Kennedy is Jen’s newest friend, a tennis instructor she hardly knows at all.  And Samira is Jen’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, whom none of them have met before – Jen included – desperate for a break to escape her newborn twins.

It’s not the most natural of group dynamics. Five hours in, things are already going horribly wrong – and that’s before someone has their throat slit in the kitchen.

“Everybody liked to think that they were a moral person, but usually this just meant that they had never been truly tested.”

This was everything you want in a psychological thriller: innumerable twists and turns that leave you suspecting everyone, right up until the very last moment. Everyone has their loathsome side, and a twisted game initiated by a mysterious third-party figure has everyone confronting their worst behaviours and life-ruining betrayals.

I’ve read my fair share of locked room mysteries and this one was fresh and inventive, particularly because of the switch between multiple third-person perspectives throughout to keep us on our toes. Yes it’s a little bit silly at times (à la Harlan Coben), but nonetheless thoroughly enjoyable and expertly plotted.

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Trademark charm in David Nicholls’ You Are Here ★★★★

Michael is a seasoned walker. Solitary, long, wet walks through grey English countryside are his kryptonite. Marnie – not so much. She hasn’t left her London flat for longer than she cares to admit and isn’t much of a fan of the great outdoors. A mutual friend has brought together the two recent singletons (are we still saying that, or is it just too Bridget Jones?) on a walking holiday.

Michael is walking coast to coast. None of the rest of the group are attempting anything as ambitious, and soon the relentless rain has scared off the three other walkers, who have scattered back to the safe havens of their various homes. Marnie decides, however, to stick it out, and soon they are two.

‘Fun on the moors! No wonder people went mad here. There was beauty in its severity, but couldn’t he find beauty in something bright and noisy and alive, somewhere populated even by just one person?’

Marnie is in her late thirties, Michael in his early forties, and both have gone through recent separations and are reckoning with their next steps in life. Over the course of the long, wet hike, they open up to each other about their biggest hopes and fears. Marnie keeps intending to get the train back to London, before deciding to stay for just one more day of the trek.

You Are Here is brimming with Nicholls’ trademark charm and heart. It’s funny and sentimental without being overly so, and the characters, for all their foibles, are lovable.

Nicholls perfectly captures the English countryside in all its beauty (and otherwise) and has a knack for the perfect metaphor to capture a character’s feelings, like how he describes “Melancholy … creeping in, the kind of distilled, high-grade sadness found under a bus shelter in a rainy seaside town.” Maybe these cultural references won’t translate to foreign audiences, but anyone who has spent any time in the UK knows exactly what that means. The two leads have rich internal lives and we depart the novel feeling like we know them quite well indeed.

Most of this book is conversation, and Nicholls is a gifted screenwriter, so it’s no surprise that this has a cinematic quality to it (and after the success of the magnificent One Day Netflix adaption, watch this space…) You Are Here is warm and wry and profound in its simplicity.

You Are Here will be published this May. With thanks to the publisher for the advanced copy. All quoted material is subject to change prior to publication.

Clever, subversive speculative fiction: My Murder by Katie Williams ★★★★½

Lou has been murdered by a serial killer, and brought back to life by a government branch called the ‘replication commission’. Lou and the other victims were genetically engineered – cloned, although it’s impolite to say so – from their remains and have rejoined society anew.

The killer had killed before her, but it was her death – a new mother with a months’-old baby at home, out for a run in the park – that set public fury alight. She is the perfect tragic victim. In protest, women began drawing lipstick in a line across their throats, symbol of the gruesome way in which these victims were killed. And so the replication commission decide to bring her, and the other women, back to life. These are, it is decided, special cases that warrant such treatment.

‘The replication commission wouldn’t bring back some random girl killed by her boyfriend. How many of those were there? As a matter of fact, I knew the number: three per day, every day. The country already had too many people to begin with. We couldn’t clone everyone who died or even everyone who’d been murdered, so the reasoning went.’

Adjusting back to her life isn’t all smooth sailing. Motherhood feels, as it had before her death, like an ill-fitting skin – her new body no longer bearing the caesarean scar – and she gets reprimanded at work for inappropriate behaviour. Unable to sleep, she asks husband Silas to recount, on repeat, the hours after her murder, trying to make sense of it all.

‘Nova was born, and I was washed out to sea. Days later, I was spat back ashore, the jetsam of the flotsam, one of those, whichever used to be the ship. I came to myself, days later, lactation net snapped on my head and Nova latched to my chapped tit. I was both on the mattress and of the mattress. I know what that’s called. I know there’s a name for it. I don’t need to say it. It didn’t mean I didn’t love her, no matter how I felt, how I didn’t feel.’

This is SO good. It’s clever and innovative and unpredictable, and at times a seriously scary piece of speculative fiction. I gobbled it up in a few sittings. The writing is economical and precise, propelling the plot forward while building the protagonist’s rich interior life.

Williams’ world-building is also cleverly done – it’s a world not so dissimilar to our own (perhaps a few decades on) and the sci-fi elements – driverless cars, immersive VR and hoverboards – are smoothly integrated into the story.

The bodies of dead women for macabre entertainment is inescapable in our contemporary culture – spawning a thousand murder podcasts and feature-length documentaries on Netflix. This near-future world is no different, and the worst is yet to come: a new VR video game, where players can assume the avatars of the murdered women as they are stalked and murdered, becomes an overnight sensation. This trope is cleverly subverted in My Murder: by being brought back to life, Lou has agency. She has the opportunity to tell, and write, her own story.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Mesmerizing story of art under occupation: Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad ★★★★★

Sonia, an actress escaping a disastrous love affair with a married colleague, arrives in Israel to visit her sister, Haneen. The two are of Palestinian descent but were raised in London, spending summers visiting family in Haifa. It has been years since Sonia returned, and an uneasy relationship with Haneen, with all the baggage of ‘the long frail story of our sisterhood, and all the petty crimes committed, the crosshatching of intention and advantage and betrayal’, makes for complicated feelings about her trip to the ancestral homeland.

Sonia is soon introduced to Haneen’s charismatic and forthright friend Mariam, who is staging a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Sonia is enlisted to read the part of Gertrude until Mariam can recruit another actress, but this quickly morphs into a role as permanent cast member. Her Classical Arabic is rusty and she is forced to listen intently and learn quickly.

The book is haunted with personal and political ghosts. Sonia remembers her childhood summers, vividly recalling the visit to a young man on hunger strike after his release from an Israeli jail – an image that has imprinted itself indelibly in her mind. She returns to a family home no longer theirs. She wrangles with the failures of her first marriage and questions of motherhood. She tries to understand what has happened in the decades of her absence from Palestine, after the second intifada.

Hammad writes elegantly, each line word-perfect and layered with meaning, and creates a deeply moving portrait of not only of the individuals at the heart of the story but also of the Palestinian people.

Life under the occupation is relentless: ‘constant calamity was itself the condition of normal life’ – and the pursuit of art is by no means immune to such chaos. Between the checkpoints, arrests, interrogations, and displacement – their production is forced to relocate on multiple occasions, unable to find a stable home – it takes the gumption and resilience of a character like Mariam to spearhead the production. ‘If we let disaster stand in our way we will never do anything,’ she says. ‘Every day here is a disaster.’

‘Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary. These public developments created a feeling among the cast that we were, in fact, preparing ourselves on a training base for an operation with a transcendental goal, that in combing our translated lines for subtext we were fighting the odds in the name of Palestinian freedom.’

What is the meaning and purpose of art? Is it catharsis, or political tool, or a completely futile endeavour? It’s these questions that Hammad explores thoughtfully and in a nuanced way, interrogating the complexities of performance, of belonging, and of freedom. It’s completely unforgettable.

https://www.msf.org/donate

Harrowing and powerful story of revolution: Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez ★★★★½

This short novel packs a powerful, harrowing punch.

It’s 1980’s Peru, and the ‘Shining Path’ guerilla group, driven by Maoist-Leninist ideology, are terrorizing the country in pursuit of a new world order. Claudia Salazar Jiménez, in a brilliant translation by Elizabeth Bryer, follows three women: Melanie, a journalist in the big city who wants to capture the horrors of the insurgency; Modesta, who grows crops and raises guinea-pigs to eke out a living for her children in a mountain village; and Marcela, who abandoned her family to join the revolution, spurred on by the promise of real, lasting change.

‘The tapestry kept growing in a dance of ideas: class struggle, revolution, starting in the countryside, Mao, Lenin, Marx, Communist Party, no stopping until power is gained. … Believing in projects financed by others, in unions, in rallies, was illusory.’

Between the fragments of these women’s stories, there are stream-of-consciousness paragraphs depicting unimaginable horror, giving the effect of watching a scene unfold with strobe lighting. Her prose is evocative and vivid – uncomfortably so – but also lyrical.

‘They don’t know the feminine is the origin of everything. It’s ferment, magma, purification, creation. The dawn that will rise when the revolution is complete.’

Stepping into the heads of three women provides context of the very different kinds of lives women of different social strata, economic power and socio-political backgrounds lived in the crossfire of ideological warfare. As bigger forces shape their lives, the women also contend with personal struggles – lazy husbands and long-distance girlfriends and the daily grind of mothering – until everything becomes subsumed by external forces of destruction.

It doesn’t make for easy reading, but it’s an affecting, impactful book, elevating voices we rarely hear in mainstream English-language fiction.

—

Blood of the Dawn is published by Deep Vellum, a publishing house specialising in literature in translation. They have a brilliant selection on their website, and I would highly recommend checking them out if you’re looking to read more translated literature.

Quietly devastating: Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan ★★★★

Tom is a reporter in 1990’s London, the heyday of gutter journalism. When he hears about a child missing – then found dead – then suspected murdered! – he thinks all his Christmases have come at once. Desperate to get the scoop before any other newspapers get their grubby hands on the story, he ventures to the council estate where the tragedy took place, and begins to ingratiate himself with the neighbours.

“A hot knot of excitement throbbed in his throat. There was nothing better than this, the feeling of stepping onto the precipice of what was definitely worthwhile when you still didn’t quite know what it was. He had some version of this feeling every time he broke anything, no matter how banal, he was new enough for that, but he had never stepped on anything of this order before.”

The dead child is three-year-old Mia, and the suspected perpetrator is ten-year-old Lucy, the daughter of Irish immigrants, and the story writes itself: “feckless foreign wanderers with a whiff of abuse and chaos turn on the Deserving Poor.” Lucy is the daughter of Carmel, who fell pregnant as a teen and had tried desperately to end her pregnancy. “To be both Irish and unwantedly pregnant was unspeakable, wrong in a way that went beyond law,” she thinks, and to escape the shame and start over, her mother uproots the family to London in the late 70s. That’s where they find themselves – on the estate where Lucy is now in police custody and the family have been put up in a hotel.

The newspaper, of course, have paid for the hotel. Their modus operandi is to whisk the family away to somewhere other reports can’t get the scoop first; to pay for their hotel bills and bar tabs and encourage them to drink as much as possible to be as loose-lipped as possible.

Journalist Tom takes each family member in turn – Richie, Lucy’s uncle, who is a barely-functioning alcoholic with destructive impulses that have followed him since his life in Ireland; John, Lucy’s grandfather, who has lived a quiet and sad life with minimal engagement in the lives of his offspring; and Carmel herself, Lucy’s mother, who has steadfastly refused to bond with Lucy in her ten years of life, providing just the bare minimum in terms of interaction and affection.

Tom is trying to squeeze out the story, running through potential angles in his mind, and all the while thinking he’s doing a good job at playing the part of concerned community member. “He had a tension headache from the posed expression of benevolent worry he had maintained for those hours, eyebrows drawn in in quizzical bafflement that such terrible things could be happening to such wonderful people” – although the family see right through it, and provide him with little “material” he can mold into a headline-grabbing article.

Richie, Carmel and John all carry the heavy burden of generational trauma. In their third-person perspectives, we learn about the circumstances that got each of them where they are today – and it doesn’t make for light reading.

Nolan’s storytelling is economical but quietly devastating. I had expected her to subvert expectations, and she did just that. This isn’t a piece of crime fiction, trying to understand the mind of a killer child. It ends up not really about that at all. Instead, it’s a really tragic story about a family falling apart and trying to put themselves back together again.

“She felt something like fondness or a grudging admiration… toward life itself, how persistent and absurd and reckless a force it could be.”

Questioning the true-crime industrial complex: Penance by Eliza Clark ★★★★

Ever been sucked into the true-crime industrial complex? Listened to a podcast about a murder or watched a salacious Netflix documentary or peeked at a Reddit thread about a missing persons case? Me neither 👀

Alec Z. Carelli, a journalist disgraced during the News of the World phone hacking scandal, is looking for ‘the next big hit’. He spends his days ‘combing through the trashiest websites the internet had to offer’ – and, to his mind, he strikes gold. A sixteen-year-old girl, Joan (Joni) Wilson, has been horrifically kidnapped, tortured, and set alight by a group of her peers. The story hasn’t made the news the way it would any other day of the year, because it happens on the eve of the EU Referendum, when the UK votes leave. ‘There was nothing to be gained from reporting on this story’, Alex remarks. ‘There were no grooming gangs or immigrants to blame, no vicious foreign teens.’ So he decides that he will provide the definitive account of those horrific events in Crow, a decaying seaside town in the North of England, and make a pretty penny doing it. How much is actually true – well, that’s up to us to decide.

‘I’ve always thought of the truth as quite a plastic thing. I admit I have no scruples when it comes to splitting hairs over tiny details, because what I’m interested in is emotional truth. I’m interested in getting across a higher understanding of a story.’

As I often feel when I read books about teenagers, you couldn’t pay me enough to be 16 again. Clark writes with razor-sharp precision about the absolute misery of teenage girlhood: the pettiness, bullying, meanness, self-consciousness. Carelli investigates the three perpetrators of the crime – spoilt Angelica, daughter of a local right-wing celebrity, quiet and friendless Violet, and Dolly, who has an extremely disturbing internet history. Clark shows us how toxic teenage energy can feed on and off itself, sucking these girls into twisted and perverse behaviour that culminates in actual, cold-blooded murder.

There’s a pastiche of Tumblr threads and re-imagined conversations, podcast transcripts and therapeutic writing samples. As an insight into contemporary internet culture, it completely excels. It’s a cautionary tale about dark corners of the online world and how they can bleed over into real life with catastrophic impact.

It also satirizes the popularity of true crime, particularly the podcast transcripts with absolutely stomach-churning ‘edgy’ commentary (featuring one fictional podcast, I Peed on your Grave, that is particularly heinous) and makes no secret of the fact that Carelli is just another gutter journalist trying to exploit a community and a family for money, feeding off this inexorable pull of the macabre we seem to have developed. But it isn’t always entirely clear what Clark is trying to do – she doesn’t spare any punches in the retelling of the crime, making the reader complicit in the voyeurism of it all – and doesn’t interrogate where exactly this obsession with the genre (if you can call it that) is coming from. A stronger critical lens would have made for a more cohesive, interesting outcome. It felt like a lot was going on, but the ideas weren’t all fully developed.

It was riveting, though – in a moody, grimy seaside town, during a brittle, divisive time in contemporary British history – and it nearly all came together. I liked it a lot, despite some shortcomings.

‘It is one thing to identify with a killer – strange, but I feel not out of the sphere of ordinary behaviour for teenagers, even when taken to the extreme of imagining yourself and this killer as two halves of a whole. Teenagers can be extremely strange, especially as they experiment with the boundaries around societal norms. But it is entirely another to become so wrapped up in your fantastical relationship with a killer that you follow in his footsteps and commit an unspeakable act.’

TWs abound: sexual assault, murder, torture

Provocative and thrilling: The Guest by Emma Cline ★★★★

Alex is a twenty-two-year-old getting by through charming, manipulating and exploiting wealthy men around her. She’s adrift with nothing to her name: no home, no family, no backstory – all we know is her here, in the Hamptons, in the last dregs of summer. Her aim is to ‘keep the day blurry’, getting by on a mixture of pills and alcohol and the kindness – or otherwise – of strangers.

Being a sex worker in the city had grown tiring, but she has a good thing going with Simon, a fifty-something rich guy who moves her in for the month of August, introduces her to his friends, keeps her wined and dined as she molds her personality to suit his desires. After a slip up one evening at a friend’s house, he coolly invites her to leave – one way train ticket in hand, and a chauffeured ride to the station.

The problem is, Alex has nowhere to go. She latches on to chance encounters and decides that on Labor Day, the day of Simon’s party, she’ll go back to him. She just has to wait out the days until then. These six days are about survival, and performance. Amid grotesque displays of wealth, her poverty is a sharp contrast – a broken phone, a bag of clothes, a key to an apartment that’ll no longer work since her flatmates changed the locks.

“There were things that you actually could not fix. Still, there must be a moment when … the fear burns up all the psychic fuel that keeps it going.”

It’s stressful reading.

I enjoyed every minute of it.

Alex is pretty terrible. She’s a kleptomaniac with very few, if any, moral scruples. She gets away with so much because of her youth and beauty and whiteness, masquerading as an old college friend of someone or a trusted ‘friend of the family’ who can slip into an exclusive beach club, take the hand of a young boy and spend the day eating and drinking on a stranger’s expense account. But as she begins to lose her grip on reality, the cracks start to show, and the tension builds deliciously, restlessly, as the novel stretches out towards Simon’s Labor Day party and the lingering hope of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Emma Cline’s writing has the same sensuous, luminous feel as in her first book, The Girls, but this is a better novel – the prose is less overwrought and has more substance, subtly interrogating ideas about wealth and womanhood and power. It’s tense and thrilling and we don’t know quite in which direction it’ll go, and I’m still thinking about it 48 hours later.

“Young women who had… vacated some part of themselves, ready to be moved in any suggested direction.”

Funny, maddening and messy: Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey ★★★½

Not many people get married AND divorced before they’re thirty. Unfortunately, Maggie is one of them. At twenty-eight, her and her husband of less than two years, Jon, have called it quits on their marriage. The novel opens with a slew of reasons why – the mundane, depressing detritus of a relationship: despising the way the other person is clingy at parties or eats in bed or fails at veganism.

The admin ensues: they have to disentangle their lives, make decisions on ‘what to do about the piece of crap couch we’d bought barely a year ago. The warranty on history’s worst sofa had outlasted our marriage.’ They agree to try to treat each other kindly in the process. So Maggie briskly picks herself up and gets on with her life – if you don’t count the daily texts, emails and voicemails to Jon, the failure to show up at her graduate job or any social occasion, and throwing herself head-first into online dating.

‘And now I was alone on a hot June evening, eating bread and butter in my wedding lingerie because the rest of my underwear was dirty. I sprinkled some salt on a hunk of baguette and said, “divorce,” out loud, to see how it felt or maybe just to be dramatic. I picked at an expensive, lacy wedgie and wondered, as I had almost hourly for the past week or so, if maybe it had all been a huge mistake.’

This is a very interior novel, essentially a long stream-of-consciousness about a messy woman going through a tough time, so if you’re not a fan of that genre, steer clear. I personally have a soft spot for it, and this one is genuinely funny and acerbic and compelling. The protagonist is quite insufferable, but also relatable – holding a mirror up to what we can all be like in our worst moments – and we still feel empathy for Maggie and her horrible way of dealing with things, even though she is utterly maddening.

It’s probably a bit old-fashioned now (the style reminded me of Bridget Jones’ Diary) but I also liked the random lists of Google searches punctuating chapters. If anyone knows you’re going through a breakdown before you do, it’s your search history.

Lastly, and hurrah, we do see character growth and self-awareness as Maggie begins to climb her way out of the hole – aided by her ever-supportive group of best friends from university, a new friend and fellow divorcee named Amy, and her work mentor/landlord Merris. That said, none of them are afraid to dish out tough love when Maggie really needs it – and boy, does she need it by the end.

The beginning and end were great, the middle bit sagged, so I’m concluding this as a 3.5* read with lots of potential from this author.

“I think your thirties are honestly the perfect age. Like in a way being thirty-one is exactly like being twenty-six, except you’re smarter and hotter and you know a bit about tiles.”