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“Three million people in the City of Angels, according to the last census, easily half of ‘em up to something they don’t want the other half to know.”

You think you know where this quote comes from. It must be Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled, noir detective Philip Marlowe. The guy’s always got a line, always gotta make a crack; he’s got more cracks than a potter’s rejects.

The quote is the first line in the 1989 Broadway musical City of Angels and the rest is just my scribbling, my notebook looks like a bird’s nest built on the page.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler is much more than wise cracks from a pulp fiction Detective. It is an atmospheric and violent story about gamblers, swindlers, back street porno dealers (and makers), murderers and gangsters. Chandler makes 1939 Los Angeles feel almost contemporary and far from the sanitised versions in most movies of the time. There are gay characters, at least one person with mental illness and characters with enough vices to lay some off on Miami.

Chandler expertly sets up atmosphere through his narrator, Marlowe. He is both world weary and keen to do a great job. Despite women being attracted to him, Marlowe appears less interested in an emotional life; he is the archetypal all business guy. A man’s man if you like, but wise enough to recognise that both sexes in his orbit have strengths and weaknesses.

Marlowe’s character is what gives The Big Sleep its style.

“The most durable thing in writing is style,” said novelist Raymond Chandler, “and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”

Each scene is set, visually and emotionally. Whether it’s Marlowe describing his outfit in exact detail down to the “dark little clocks” on his socks. The description could be left here but Chandler adds style with Marlowe’s next line.

“I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

We now know Marlowe, where he’s heading and what kind of story this guy has got has signed up for.

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But Chandler’s writing is not all style over content. The evocative prose takes the reader along on Marlowe’s journey and through his pain. We are persuaded that the Detective’s values are inherently good, or at least for the greater good.

What we don’t get with The Big Sleep is neat bow tied around a mystery at the end. Instead Chandler gives us writing that soars, and recently I heard an interview with Booker Prize winner John Banville who says that Chandler was a big influence on his writing. And when you read Christine Falls or the Quirke and Stafford books, you find Raymond Chandler’s essence breathing over them. This could have come from Banville’s hand.

“Then she laughed. It was almost a racking laugh. It shook her as the wind shakes a tree. I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something already known and it didn't fit. Then I thought that was too much to get out of a laugh.”

For Chandler “The scene outranked the plot.” This creative process can lead to ambiguous endings and moral uncertainty. There is a question in The Big Sleep about whether Marlowe could have prevented certain murders if he had gone to the police with what he knew.

In Marlowe’s world this would have meant not completing the job for which his client had hired him; part of which was protecting the client’s daughters. The people who died were all mixed up in corruption, crime and violence so was it any loss? This is not typical behaviour from a detective and even less so in 1939 when the book was published.

The book’s moral ambiguity can only come about through Marlowe being so completely created. And Marlowe’s complete creation is only made possible by Chandler’s extraordinary writing.

The style of The Big Sleep might have become a cliché but get back to the original and read it slowly. Real slowly.

Have you read The Big Sleep yet? Let me know what you thought about it in the comments.

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I read The Big Sleep on The Borrow Box app through Cork County Library. It is published by Penguin Books

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What is worse: the act or the lie? Or telling a lie that turns the truth into a secret The Truth About Ruby Cooper is about lies, secrets and the Pandora’s box of pain that is released with the untruth and powered by secrecy.

The story starts in suburban Boston at the family home of well-off middle-class family. The father is a successful pastor and investment broker, the mother, an Irish woman and homemaker, and the two daughters, Erin, the pretty academic and Ruby the brooding, jealous younger sister.

“Everyone talked about how pretty Erin was, and then, when they noticed me, they’d hastily say something like ‘and Ruby’s freckles are so cute.”

As Bebe sings in ‘At The Ballet’ from A Chorus Line:

"Different" is nice, but it sure isn't pretty.
"Pretty" is what it's about.
I never met anyone who was "different"
Who couldn't figure that out.”

In Bebe’s case she finds the beauty she is searching through for in ballet where ‘every Prince has got to have his Swan.’ Ruby Cooper, on the other hand, takes a different course. She drills a hole in her bedroom wall and watches her older sister give her working class boyfriend, Milo, handjobs. Like a darker, more menacing version of the Pulp song Babies, but instead of spying on a sister’s friend, Ruby is spying on her sister. Her jealousy, we realise, has taken her into strange and unsettling territory.

This envy mutates into a desire to hurt, into a scream for attention and ‘The Incident’ on which the book turns. The brutality and callousness of what Ruby manufactures is shocking if viewed in isolation. However, Liz Nugent writes her characters so well that the reader finds themself realising the absolute logic to the character herself of her behaviour. She has given us the clues, dropped the breadcrumbs and left the door ajar.

This is also brave territory for the writer to explore. It is difficult to discuss without giving away the plot but Nugent is unafraid to ask a big question about a woman who has set out to lie about a crime and manipulate the situation to such an extent that it destroys her family and several other lives.

We are thrust into a spinning, upside down world of class and gender experiences of the legal system. Who should be believed and why? We know the legal system favours the wealthy and so does Ruby.

She is a magnetically terrible person. Her choices would send anyone else’s moral compass spinning but somewhere in that dark soul, we want to believe that she can be saved. After she descends into addiction, her family pack Ruby off to an expensive rehab clinic where she is a disruptive and entitled prick. But she’s an addict and she should feel sympathy for her - right?

Nugent takes us on a different path. The one that a lesser writer would avoid. There is a terrible thought that bubbles in our own minds, almost as if by spending time with this nasty woman we have, by osmosis, taken on some of her characteristics. What, we ask, if Ruby’s descent into addiction was not a cry for help but a choice: did Ruby Cooper choose the path to addiction as the ultimate deflection of her own behaviour? The behaviour she cannot own up to.

We know intellectually that addiction is an illness and there but for the Grace of God go we. But don’t we have that tiny shrill voice, tinny and always shouting, somewhere in our heads that rants and raves about addicts making a choice. “ I never became a heroin addict did I?” it harangues, “I never drink myself to black out - you don’t need to keep drinking, do you?” Is Nugent making us want something bad or worse to happen to Ruby. Wouldn’t everyone be happier if Ruby and her semi-psycopathic lying was out of their lives?

But the good part of our souls, the liberal and caring part hopes that she will find redemption. She will follow the 12 steps, she will make peace with her demons and become a transformed woman.

The Truth About Ruby Cooper is an excellent book that does so much more than a standard thriller. It goes to horrible places without accepting any received wisdom and forces us to think critically about situations about which we already have firm opinions. The plot unravels back and forth across a quarter of a century gathering energy each time a lie is revealed and finally there is healing. Fractures are gently and carefully fused, characters are able to accept themselves and forgiveness pops through the dark earth like a plant in Spring sunshine.

And then, like all great Liz Nugent novels, right at the end a twist drops the bottom out of your stomach and we wonder if it is all a lie.

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Have you read The Truth About Ruby Cooper? How does it compare to other thrillers or other books by Liz Nugent. Let me know in the comments.

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I purchased this book at the wonderfully independent Bantry Bookshop

How many genres of crime fiction have we discovered? Noir, Cozy, Golden Age, Procedural, Scandi, Tartan... even Drakkar Noir (which is a perfume, but would make a brilliant sub-genre name,) and several others. How about ‘Covid Crime’ , ‘Pandemic Plot’ or ‘Lockdown Noir’?

Setting a crime novel during lockdown is such an obvious idea. There is isolation, quiet eeriness and a real danger of actually dying from the virus as well as the fear most people felt. In some ways the emotions felt during lockdown were those of a wartime population under bombardment; you went for walks scared of contagion, you watched TV every day for the latest death figures and you made decisions that you might not usually make.

The characters in Catherine Ryan Howard’s 56 Days have just met as Ireland heads towards the first COVID lockdown. Ciara and Oliver’s awkward courtship and fear of the unknown draw them together in a choice to share Oliver’s plush flat until restrictions are lifted. They both have secrets which gradually seep out like the bodily fluids leaking from the body found 56 days later.

Two Detectives are investigating the body, DI Leah ‘Lee’ Riordan and DS Karl Connolly. The latter enters the book naked and handcuffed which is one of the most spectacular character intros I can remember.

The Detectives’ narrative is in the present while Ciara and Oliver are based in the past and gradually catch up to the investigation. There is also a journalist, Laura Mannix, who is running her own investigation into a particularly brutal historic crime and the now hidden identity of its perpetrator.

Howard uses a fragmented timeline with characters sometimes repeating earlier episodes from their own point of view. She uses this structure as more than a device to keep the plot on the rails; it is integral to developing and maximising tension throughout the book.

There are oblique references to past events, discussions that name people but when the reader thinks that they may have a clear run to the end, the writer adjusts the reality slightly.

The book asks some big questions about criminal justice, the ease with which people can be heated up to rage and the corrosiveness of secrets. The biggest, however, is about class. The book turns on class and how privilege allows easier roads to recovery from whatever challenge or tragedy has befallen an individual. It can be access to a good job, financial support or just feeling comfortable in specific situations. Without the characters’ class differences 56 Days would lose a large part of the anger that forces one of them to act in such an extreme way.

Catherine Ryan Howard has written an exceptional thriller. It is not kinetic; there are no punches thrown between the leading characters and the city in which they live is noiseless.

The point is secrets can only thrive in silence, and in lockdown the world went very quiet.

Lockdown noir feels like the perfect description for 56 Days.

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Let’s Talk About The TV Adaptation.

Amazon Prime have produced an eight part TV version of 56 Days. Show runners Karyn Usher and Lisa Zwerling have made some questionable (and that’s being charitable), choices. Firstly, being good American TV people, they have set the show in Boston; whether this is because Boston traditionally viewed as the most Irish city in the US is not clear. We, non-US citizens are used to this (see also The Girl On The Train, Big Little Lies, and All Her Fault), but it still grates and The Girl On the Train movie was made infinitely worse because of its transatlantic transposition.

The second choice Usher and Zwerling made was to skip the Covid part. Completely. No lockdown, no global virus, just two kids meeting in a grocery store and moving in together. If you remove the lockdown from a book titled 56 Days (the length of the first Irish lockdown), you are no longer adapting a story, but gutting its logic

So two key elements that support the entire drama and premise of the story eliminated because…whatever.

In their place we have unnecessary extra graphic sex implying different characters than those in the books and a new subplot around money which may reflect the producers’ obsessions rather than the dramatic impetus of the story.

The script is devoid of tension and the lead characters could have come from any two-bit US series.

What is the hardest to understand is that all the drama, tension and structure were already in the book. The event around which the secrets are kept is completely gripping. So why would Usher and Zwerlig (and all the Amazon suits), change so much of it? Did they have a script ready that was kind of similar to 56 Days but thought the existing IP would help them sell the concept better? Or do they not recognise great work when they see it?

Read the book because it is incredible, and watch Adolescence on Netflix instead of the insipid TV adaptation of 56 Days.

Have you read the book and seen the TV series? How would you compare the two? Let me know in the comments.

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56 Days is published by Corvus Books in the UK and Ireland

Author Catherine Ryan Howard will be appearing at The West Cork Literary Festival

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If you started reading in the 70s and 80s then you probably picked up a copy of your parents’ Jackie Collins books. They had Hollywood glitz and glamour, shoulder pads and big hair, incredibly sexy women and spectacularly endowed men. Back then they were marketed as ‘bonk busters’ which did them a great disservice because Collins wrote about the barriers women faced in Hollywood, the music industry and life and how they overcame those barriers through guile, intelligence and sometimes sex appeal.
Her heroines were not victims; Lucky Santangelo is tough and focused and today would probably be described as a “warrior queen.”

Louise O’Neill’s Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? captures the glossy spirit of a classic Jackie Collins Hollywood novel. There is wealth and beauty and an obsession with female looks but, tonally, it is modern and restrained, and hints at a much darker undercurrent.

Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? could be seen as Jackie Collins for the #MeToo era with some of the excesses dialled down and the social critique dialled up. It offers the same addictive “what will happen next?” pull and insider Hollywood dirt, but with modern psychological awareness and less pure hedonistic fun. In WHTMS? there is fun, but, for young women it comes with a price. And the dirt is systemic. In Collins’ time there was an acceptance that powerful men were bastards and women had to fight to succeed, today this state of affairs is not accepted. Collins’ heroines scored victories over individuals but O’ Neill’s Chelsea Stone wants to score a victory over the system.

A fortune teller convinces the Stone twins' mother that one daughter will be the most famous woman on earth, and the other will be dead by thirty. Mum takes this seriously and bases her whole life’s purpose on fulfilling this prophecy, regardless of the cost to her daughters.

The girls become hugely successful child and teen stars in a kind of Disney Chanel way and then Chelsea lands a globally successful TV show that sees her fame eclipse that of her sister. Much of what happens next is hinted at early on by O’Neill but we learn that Maddie has spoken out in a GQ interview and been crucified by the studio, the press and the newly nascent vicious bloggers and social media trolls. Maddie disappears and is presumed to have died or committed suicide which feeds the fire of further speculation and conspiracy theories.

O’Neill tells us the story in dual timelines. The past getting closer to the present and always informing Chelsea’s concerns and decision making process. Hanging over the plot is Chelsea’s secret which is revealed at the end as brutal. The question that remains is whether Chelsea is a malicious person or did she do something malicious in order to survive in Hollywood. Surely a plot line straight out of Jackie Collins.

The writing style is straightforward. At times I wanted more than ‘tightness across her chest’ or ‘she collapsed onto a stool.’ How did she collapse? Was the tightness like being buried under concrete or like the millions of hateful comments had come to life and were walking across her torso?

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The book’s theme about how the abuses suffered by young women in entertainment is timeless. But by focusing on the early 2000s, O’Neill shoves our head under the ice cold water of brutal Perez Hilton takedowns and TMZ pile ons. Remember 16 year old Britney being asked on a prime time TV current affairs whether she was a virgin? And how she was hounded by the press into an emotional breakdown? This is the reality for the Stone Sisters and O’Neill is not afraid to pull it out of its dark corner and give it a kicking.

When Maddie’s storage locker is discovered, its contents are put up online (in a direct reference to Paris Hilton’s similar situation). The person responsible claims to know Chelsea’s secret which launches a blackmail plot and further revelations about Maddie’s life, including a chance that she may still be alive.

This episode gives us the second strongest point in the book; that lives cease to belong to those living them. The reason for this is the book’s strongest point; there is a power imbalance, mainly gender based, that leaves young women especially vulnerable. Whether this is older men having sex with much younger women and girls, or expecting them to look sexy but be virgins or to be skinny but not so skinny that people will talk. Whatever the standard that is set, there is always someone desperate enough to exceed it and someone ready to take down a woman that does not quite achieve it 24/7.

The pursuit of power over others seems to be for its own sake.

Chelsea’s husband Nick, who is (conveniently), a tech billionaire seems to hint at a more modern problem. His life has become part of his corporation but sexually he is more excited by online images and promises than by his own wife. This was not an issue faced by Jackie Collins’ heroines and if it did there was a handily placed young stud to help them out. This issue is serious though. Young men today are more porn obsessed than ever which is ruining their ability to have and enjoy sex. Nick might be part of the problem that afflicts him.

At the end of the book there is a marked acceleration in pace as Chelsea solves the mystery of her blackmailer and finds her own voice. It is on live TV and is devastating. It is the speech that we needed and it is when Chelsea Stone becomes a real hero. Sure in a Jackie Collins book, Chelsea would not have relied on her husband’s social media app to get her message out but would have live-streamed on his fiercest rival’s platform but it still works. As Chelsea says.

“And I’m not blameless either…I wanted to be famous. I thought that if everyone loved me, maybe that would mean I would finally feel good enough…But you don’t understand what it’s like to be treated like a commodity. You don’t know what it does to you, how corrosive it is. You become an object, a thing, something not quite human…”

In Whatever Happened To Madeline Stone? one woman escaped and was able to fight back. But how many have been left by the wayside, broken in spirit and body?

We like to believe we live in more civilized times; that the media excesses of the past have been tamed by a more generous, female-led mindset. But then we see Cosmopolitan, a magazine branded as 'Fun, Fearless, Female’, publishing a 'Worst Dressed' list that leads with a photograph of three young, slim women. Lucky Santangelo would not have stood for it, and nor should we.

Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? is published by Bantam

Read my Review of The Stud by Jackie Collins

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Have you read Whatever Happened To Madeline Stone? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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I purchased Whatever Happened To Madeline Stone in the wonderful Bantry Bookshop.

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This is a kind of plea to some of the most important people in publishing today; the podcasters who talk about books, interview authors and share their passion for stories. This group is vital in keeping the world engaged with literature. There are many who run book podcasts as passion projects and there are excellent pods by established broadcasters such as the UK’s BBC, Ireland’s RTE and America’s NPR which deal with books as part of the general cultural and entertainment landscape. Recently podcast giants have started to elbow into this niche and use their cross brand promotional reach to hoover up the competition with the release of Goalhanger’s The Book Club.

Falling literacy rates and the vicious cutting of arts subjects in state schools are not unconnected with the polarisation and radicalisation of politics. Reading fiction helps develop critical thinking and the ability to hold multiple perspectives. As Melissa Daimler wrote recently in Forbes,

“Non-fiction gives us information. Fiction gives us experience”

( Full article here: Why Reading Still Matters for Critical Thinking) This is why we need people to read more books and podcasts are a great tool in supporting this aim.

However, not all pods are created equal. There are differences in style, focus and even quality. In the list below are ten areas that podcasts about writers and writing sometimes fall down. There are egregious failures where books seem to take a back seat to personal enrichment (see points 1 and 6), and there are huge successes like Crime Time FM, The Radio Two Book Club and, grudgingly Goalhanger’s The Book Club (although see point 5).

My respect and love goes out to every person who makes a podcast about books because it is hard work. So please, dear book podcaster, take these requests in the loving spirit in which they are intended and let us get the world reading more.

1. It’s About The Books - Sure we need an intro and you think the personal(ity) touch is important but get it out of the way and get to the point. Intros over 90 seconds double your drop out rate, meaning if you haven’t got to the point in a minute then we are gone. I heard two podcasters talk for 17 minutes about the kids colouring set they were earning commission from before they get to the book that the episode is about. At a certain point we don’t care- the book will always be more interesting than you.

2. Know Your Stuff - We are here because we want to know more and you are there to tell us things we don’t know or see things in ways we had not considered. On a podcast about Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, the hosts pondered whether the town of New Ross was a real place. Spoiler alert; yes it is, and the book is literally dedicated to the people of New Ross. My friends, you should know that if you want us to take you seriously.

3. Not All Books Are Great - It is scary being a book reviewer. There is a tiny amount of people being paid to write about the books and the arts in general. This leads to a belief that in order to continue receiving free books the reviewers need to be kind. Credibility can easily be undermined by kindness.

4. Listen To The BBC - The BBC has been making audio content for over 103 years. They know how to structure a programme, make it sound good and attract an audience. There are some wonderful BBC book podcasts including A Good Read, Take Four Books and Sara Cox’s hugely popular Radio 2 Book Club.

5. Not Everyone is Posh - It’s not your fault that you had an expensive education and it is wonderful to listen to your insights. BUT literature is supposed to open our eyes to the world so try speaking with writers who didn’t go to the same schools, universities and parties as you. Sara Cox is, again, a great example of hosting diverse Guests and talking with them like a regular person. Also check out the wonderful Paul Burke’s interviews on Crime Time FM which are exceptional, and Writer’s Routine with Dan Simpson.

   

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6. We Know You Did An Online Sales Course - Why does every episode begin with your writing courses, your exclusive community, your discount codes for ‘Make Your Thriller Thrilling’ and a plug for your own book? It’s because somebody told you that the podcast could be your shopfront and each episode yields huge amounts of ‘content’ for you to clip and ‘repurpose’. Show off your creativity by finding a way to more seamlessly weave your sales pitch into the body of the podcast - allow us to get something from the episode before deciding if we want to give something. (See also point 1 about drop out rate).

7. Let Your Guests Talk - Interviewing people is really difficult. I completely failed at it despite studying the technique with experts. Fortunately, bad interviews are not widespread but when they happen they are awful. Key points to remember: ask one question at a time, listen to the answer for as long as the Guest wishes to speak, then ask a related follow up or move on. Keep your questions short because you are the host and we are here to listen to Colm Toibin, Andrea Mara or Zadie Smith. If in doubt listen to Harriet Gilbert on the Good Read who has been broadcasting for nearly 50 years and knows how to give her guests space.

8. The Name ‘The Book Club’ Is Taken - There are now over 50 podcasts and counting that use the words ‘Book Club’ in their title. From the Horny Book Club to the Nerd Hero Book Club passing through The Queer Catholic Book Club (find your niche!), and The Slow Burn Book Club (which focuses on romance novels), the name is pretty much taken. It was kind of disappointing that podcast giant Goalhanger chose The Book Club for its books themed podcast because you would expect a company that has 750 million downloads a year to think of a more creative name.

9. Take A Moment to Look Back - Some of the best pods focus on more than this week’s top 10 publishing PR moments. Remember that not everyone got into Sally Rooney in 2017, or Graham Greene in 1947 or even read Dickens, Austen and Forster at school. There are some very insightful episodes and series that look into older books. These also help listeners to discover authors they may not be aware or were maybe afraid of. As a podcaster these also do wonders for your credibility as they take you into the world of appreciation and have great shelf lives.

10. Be Human - According to Podcast Index more than a third of new podcasts are AI generated. This helps nobody except already wealthy tech billionaires. Of course, it is very tempting to try it but ultimately it is worthless and dangerous. Your humanity and your human reaction to fiction is what listeners and readers want. We have emotions, we cry and laugh at books we are reading, we get to the point where we have to stop reading and take a breath. Machines do not have these responses.

    ---

I have found fantastic book recommendations through podcasts. There are podcasters who have given me new appreciation for books that I have already finished - so much so that I have opened them up again. Through podcasts I was introduced to the works of Ian McEwan, Ali Smith and Graham Greene and my appreciation of other writers and their craft deepened immensely.

This widening of reading experience has shown me what is possible in my own fiction writing and, I can honestly say, has enriched my life. Podcasting is a democratic format too, with few barriers to entry on either the production or listening side.

To wrap up, dear book podcasters, thank you for making my life better and thank you for helping the world discover the joy of reading. Let’s make the world a better place, together.

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These are my current favourites in no particular order, and next week they might be different.

• A Good Read (BBC) - Harriet Gilbert and two guests each bring a book and together discuss their thoughts. A great source of reading inspiration with everything from current bestsellers to mountain guides. Ms Gilber is the consummate host.

• The Radio Two Book Club - Sara Cox talks to authors and librarians (always an underestimated group), about books. Each episode is around 15 minutes and sounds like a chat between normal people. The Radio 2 Book Club is a huge driver of reading in the UK and, as mentioned above, a gold standard for accessibility.

• Shedunnit - Host Caroline Crampton is incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about golden age crime writing. This genre is not my thing but listening to Caroline talk about the books and social changes of the time is completely compelling. Her guests are informed and insightful. It was great to see Caroline get a deal with BBC Sounds last year.

• The Irish Times Women’s Podcast - Once a month a group of Irish women discuss a book or speak with an author. The two hosts Roisin Ingle and Kathy Sheridan balance the chat and the opinions are strong and informed.

• The New Yorker Fiction - Successful writers read short stories by other successful writers. Inspiring, simple and perfect. See also the RTE Short Story competition

• Read On - The Audiobook Show - Produced by the Royal National Institute for the Blind this pod features leading authors talking about their work, and excerpts from current audio books. There is also documentary sections like how to turn comic books into an audio format, reports from festivals and how audiobook recording came to be.

What are your favourite book-themed podcasts? And why do you enjoy them so much? Let me know in the comments.

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What do our parents teach us? And how many times have we, as grown ups, found ourselves becoming our mothers and fathers? It might be a phrase that we find ourselves saying that makes us think ‘I sound like my dad’, or the noticing of every small draft or waft of air-’just like my mum.’ For Liz Nugent’s characters in Strange Sally Diamond the traits passed through the generations include violent outbursts and abusive relationships.

Intergenerational trauma is a bleak, twisted subject and, in Strange Sally Diamond its dark, intense power is brought to a close-up human level.

There are two first person narrators who both grew up as victims of abuse. One of them has been aware of this their whole life whereas, the second, Sally Diamond, at 44, is about to learn where she came from and understand a little of why she is socially awkward.

Nugent is in masterful form. A first person narrative from the point of view of someone who is psychologically damaged could very easily get bogged down but there is dark humour here too. The book begins with instructions that Sally’s s dying father gives her regarding his end;

"'When I die, put me out with the bins. I'll be dead, so I won't know any different. You'll be crying your eyes out,' and he would laugh and I'd laugh too because we both knew that I wouldn't be crying my eyes out. I never cry. When the time came, on Wednesday 29th November 2017, I followed his instructions"

Sally’s mother, Denise, had been abducted by a man at the age of eleven and held captive for several years. When the pair were finally released they entered the care of Sally’s adoptive father, who was Ireland’s leading psychiatrist, and his wife who was paediatric specialist. Denise tragically died and Sally became the adopted daughter of her two care givers. What could be better for a traumatised little girl than living with the two people that knew her best.

When we discover this we feel happy for Sally. We don’t question her lack of social skills and laugh as Sally pretends that she is deaf in order to avoid speaking with people in her local town. How many of us would like to try that trick?

Nugent cleverly and expertly builds our sympathy for Sally, surrounding her with well meaning family members and townsfolk. Her father’s notes are revealed although her mother’s were apparently burned when she passed. Sally starts to ‘improve’ and learns to socialise and even hug other people/

But there is a darkness creeping under the door like the smoke in a house fire. You may not notice it at first, and when you smell it you think it is only smoke but then you open the door and the inferno burns you. The smoke in this case is the second narrative thread, the other abused person.

Their story is difficult to listen to - in fact several times I paused the audio book and went back to it. But the author is not writing gratuitously; she is writing truthfully about the evil and malice that exists in our world. Her skill is in being able to put the reader at ease, to dress scenes up with some lovely middle class values, neutral colours and M&S scented candles before dropping in some Josef Fritzl level depravity to knock the reader off balance.

In an interview on the podcast Sarah's Bookshelves Live Liz Nugent talked about how anger is a secondary emotion that derives from its primary, namely fear. This helped me make much more sense of the Strange Sally Diamond because there is lots of rage both articulated verbally and behaviourally. And in every case it stems from fear; of being found out; of being physically threatened or of being challenged in some way.

Sally feels safe in her own space and her adoptive father knew that which is why he allowed or indulged her when she refused to socialise. But was this behaviour keeping Sally captive as her biological father had kept her mother captive? As the book developed I found myself asking this question more and more; had the psychiatrist made his patient worse? Surely if we face our fears, they diminish - look at the courses available for those scared of flying. Would the more caring action have been to force Sally out into the world?

At the end of the book we question who Sally Diamond really is. She survived an horrific start to life and then years of discovering what everyone else in the world already knew about her. This would make anyone angry. The reader is left wondering who or what is to blame for Sally’s anger. Is it generated by her situation or is it inherited from her angry, violent and sadistic father.

Liz Nugent lets us wonder.

I listened to the audiobook version of Strange Sally Diamond read by Jessica Regan, Sara Lynam and Stephen Hogan and published by Penguin. The production and performances were outstanding.

I accessed the book on the BorrowBox App through Cork County Library / Leabharlann Chontae Chorca.

Liz Nugent will be appearing at the West Cork Literary Festival with Louise O’ Neill on Friday 17th July 2026.

Have you read Strange Sally Diamond? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.

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FOOTNOTE: differences between US and UK/Ireland versions

There are differences in terminology which don’t sit comfortably. For example, the opening lines when Sally talks about putting her dad out “with the bins” has been changed in the North American edition to “with the trash.” My problem is that Sally is an Irish character who would have said ‘bins’ and not ‘trash’.

But the biggest difference between the two editions is that Nugent was asked by her American editors to make the ending more hopeful. As a result there is an additional letter inserted in the penultimate chapter suggesting a rosier future. I can understand this (kind of), from a commercial point of view but surely this is just training an audience to only appreciate happy endings and, as a publisher, this must limit the material that you can publish.

Abuse does not always have a happy ending and nor should books about the subject.

Did Liz Nugent or her editors make the right call with the changes to the book?

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John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and Louise Doughty’s A Bird In Winter share many traits. I lined them up next to each other to see how spy thrillers have developed in the last 100 years.

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The fugitive is a powerful central character for a thriller. The chase and what causes it inject excitement and tension into a story; will the protagonist stay one step ahead? Have they left clues for a hunter to follow? And was that anonymous looking man at the station one of the enemies?

Despite being written a hundred years apart, John Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps and Louise Doughty’s A Bird in Winter have much in common; both take journeys to Scotland, both deal in intense first person narratives and both are captivating in their audiobook forms.

The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan was first published in 1915 and is credited as being one of the first “man-on-the-run” thrillers. The writing is dynamic and paves the way for Fleming, Le Carré and, eventually, Louise Doughty.

Buchan was once head of Britain’s Intelligence Service and it is difficult not to see his description of the spy’s work as a precursor to George Smiley:

“A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.”

Doughty’s narrator, Bird, uses similar appearance changing tactics to Buchan’s Richard Hannay during her escape. Just like Smiley they both look for opportunities to blend in with the background - at least visually.

Hannay’s escape is triggered by the discovery of a plot to assassinate the King of Greece. This plot is revealed to Hannay by a neighbour, Franklin Scudder, who is a journalist. Hannay allows Scudder to hide out in his flat but returns one day to find Scudder murdered by a knife through his heart. Feeling he cannot trust the police, Hannay disguises himself as a milkman and escapes on a train bound for Scotland.

This trick of disguising oneself as the overlooked to avoid detection is class based in Buchan’s book but it could be argued that gender performs the same task in Doughty’s. Her protagonist, Bird or Heather, is a 50 something woman who is highly trained, resourceful and capable. She can evade and avoid and protect herself while simultaneously analysing how she got into her current situation. She variously poses as a homeless woman and a hiker and is continually underestimated.

Bird in Winter’s launch pad is a corporate meeting room called Alaska (which for anyone who has worked in corporate knows this is a sharp observation). She hears a phrase from her boss that triggers her flight.

Like Hannay, Bird makes her way to a train headed for Scotland. The exact reason for her flight is woven through the book in a series of remembrances. A slightly less action packed second act takes us back to Bird’s time in the British Army and eventual recruitment into the Secret Service - following her father’s path. It also gives us the emotional core of the character which then informs her actions.

“A moment of human stupidity” is how writer Claire Keegan describes inciting incidents. In Bird’s case there have been several. And the more she meditates on her life, the more we understand that her work and perhaps her gender have been the source of her problems; whether being trained to arrange flowers and put up with sexual abuse in the Army or being manipulated in the secret service.

Richard Hannay has no such worries about his place in the world. He is a confident white British man, just returned from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and sure that justice will prevail if he can speak to the right chap. Bird’s hope for justice relies on playing the same twisted game back to the service that they sprung on her. It also offers no hope for human redemption.

In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay must decipher a code in a book he took from the murder victim, Scudder. Through car crashes, setting explosions and being chased through the Scottish Glens by an aeroplane he keeps hold of the physical item.

Bird has a code that she must decipher in her head. This relies on her memory of events and her ability to untangle the difference between what was said or implied and what it actually meant.

In both books the characters sleep rough, inflict violence and pretend to be people they are not. There are trains and people on railway stations and local cops on the lookout but Bird also needs to deal with electronic surveillance.

In 1915 it would have been almost impossible to imagine that there would be a female action hero, but 100 years later Doughty asks the question ‘why not?’

At the end of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay’s actions save lives whereas Bird’s save only her own. The world of espionage has become so twisted, so infected with the paranoias of the Cold War that spies are spying on each other. The example of the Cambridge Five have scarred not only how the service sees itself but also how the spooks see the opportunities for themselves. In the good old days, British traitors did it out of belief; they had seen the rise of fascism, the fading away of the Empire and their own place in the world being taken over by the USA, so they sided with the Soviets.

In Buchan’s day traitors felt that the Germans represented the best chance of holding onto power and in the ‘40s there were those who agreed ideologically with the Nazis. But today ideology has been replaced with (dirty) money. Money is the root of all evil and Doughty’s book sticks a scalpel into the fleshy underbelly of corrupt wealth feeding old money in exchange for intelligence. It is the same game the Brits used to play against their Imperial subjects.

In Buchan’s days spies were real action heroes who went out and got things done. Doughty recognises that today that model has changed; action can only be taken after corporate decisions, legal opinion and risk analysis. However, agents are still trained to do nasty things that physically and mentally hurt people - but instead of heading to their club on Pall Mall afterwards for a rather splendid claret, they pop in to M&S for a ready made Beef dinner and a bottle of Malbec.

Both of these books are tense, driving and riveting examples of spy fiction. Both have the perfect blend of action and personal torment which is the cornerstone of the best espionage thrillers. And both pose a similar question at the end; was any of this worth it? In Buchan’s book the shadow of the Great War engulfs the narrator at the end while Bird is left with little more than her freedom. In espionage there is no winner, there is just a new enemy to resist.

Have you read these books or listened to the audio versions? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.

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The Audiobook Experience.

I listened to both of these novels as audiobooks through the Borrow Box app and Cork County Library.

The Thirty-Nine Steps was narrated by Rupert Degas who jumped seamlessly from Hannay’s Victorian tones into Scottish, German and working class London accents.

A Bird In Winter was narrated by the wonderful Clare Corbett who again is able to shift tone and accent beautifully.

There is an art to reading a book for audio presentation. It feels like when the combination of material and voice is right, there is an alchemy that lifts the experience. There are several books that I have not completed in the audiobook format but would go back to in the printed form because the readers did not work for me.

The Thirty-Nine Steps and A Bird In Winter are both extraordinary audio presentations of wonderfully written books.

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan is produced by Naxos Audiobooks

A Bird In Winter by Louise Doughty is produced by Faber & Faber Audio

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Ireland has come a long way in a short time. In 1963, the year that Neil Tully’s debut novel The Visit is set, the country’s first escalator was opened by the Lord Mayor of Dublin in Roche’s Department Store. Making a bigger impression in the same year was the visit of JFK in whose shadow the action of this book takes place.

We are in the small town of New Ross which is where Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was also set. The story is told in alternating points of view;

Garda Sergeant Jim Field is getting ready for Kennedy’s visit, while waiting for news of a promotion and suffering from an increasingly debilitating illness and social outcast Patrick Hatten who has been left behind in an old farmhouse, after his brother went to England and his parents died. His neighbour, Jim Casey, is the richest man in the village and wants to buy Patrick’s house and turf him out so he can expand his stud farm.

Field has a wonderful wife and daughter but he is also carrying the guilty weight of having put Patrick’s father in a mental institution several years back.

Tully’s style is deceptively pastoral. It draws you in with flowing descriptions of small town life and Wexford countryside with its local characters and idiosyncrasies. Right at the start Tully has us in the town.

“I…opened the curtain to a pair of new yellow tractors, turning from the belly of New Ross and straining against the incline of our terraced street. The glass trembled as they passed.”

And then:

“…I went back to the window. The sun flooded New Ross rooftops and warmed the Barrow beyond - the dark river flowing between the legs of fishermen standing in its shallow stretches, slicing the morning air with lines cast and recast.”

We know where we are, we can feel the slowly waking day and the people whose lives will fill it. But there is darkness and violence under the beauty, just like in the nature that surrounds the story and the town.

The reader soon realises that Tully has taken the best of Donal Ryan and Colm Toibin and combined their lyricism with the intensity and ticking clock of a Tana French or Liz Nugent thriller. The main countdown is, of course, JFK’s visit with the worry that the town will be ready and above all secure. There is a man on the loose with a stolen gun and the real fear that somebody (JFK?), will get shot.

As Field’s father-in-law puts it when watching Kennedy arrive in Berlin:

“You see the Germans on the news today, Impeccable, not even two decades after the mess they made. And there we’ll be, Paddy Irishman, shooting each other in the street over a miserable few acres.”

This manhunt is the second countdown and sometimes edges The Visit into police procedural in a positive way.

The third countdown is Field’s own health. He is getting weaker and it is unclear if he will make it to the day the President arrives. In the midst of the action, at the point in which the danger is at its most pronounced, Tully does not skimp on beautiful writing.

“Patrick believed that night came up from the ground the same as it fell from the sky. That it seeped through the earth, appearing first as shadowy pools around the grass and flowers and shrubs…he looked across the land and watched the patches of shadow and light do battle until the balance shifted and the light lost its strength and gave up. The trees and wildflowers drew up night like water, in darkening stems and trunks, closing their petals and quietening their branches where birds hid in sleep.”

It comes like a breath before the big day for both the character and the reader. Surely, we think, someone who thinks as lyrically as this could not cause any harm.

As the tension mounts and all three countdowns intersect, a fourth situation involving Field’s wife Siobhan is introduced. This clever touch is important because it enables the writer to pull back from the focus on small town Irish life and show us the national picture; the movements, and especially women’s movements, that begun in the ‘60s and were the source of the Irish progressive style of politics that we see today.

Kennedy’s visit was an important moment in Irish history; it was a recognition of the Republic as a country on the world stage, out of the shadow of 800 years of British colonisation. An overdue sense of pride was born, international investment and tourism both grew exponentially and deep friendship between the two Republics confirmed.

The Visit shows us the effect JFK’s stay in Ireland had on a human level. In anticipation of Kennedy’s arrival, international teams of reporters, TV crews and security personnel flood the area. In the local pub Field tells us.

“There were more women in the bar than I’d ever seen, and the chorus of British and American accents explained it…Local women dared to join, emboldened by their foreign peers they shared looks and nods and smiles as if they were all complicit.”

Neil Tully shows us how international diplomacy can be a force for change but it is individuals rather than countries who make that change happen. And Ireland has come a long way since JFK’s visit and that first department store escalator.

Have you read The Visit? Did you enjoy it and do you think that JFK visiting Ireland helped to inspire people? Let me know.

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The Visit by Neil Tully is published by Eriu Books in Ireland and Bonnier Books in the UK.

Neil Tully will be appearing at The West Cork Literary Festival on 11th July.

I bought the book in Bantry Bookshop, William Street, Bantry.

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There is something peculiarly attractive to English ears about precise clipped post-war tones. It provokes an almost automatic response to trust, to be intrigued and to allow the speaker the leeway to make morally dubious decisions.

Michael Kitchen deploys the perfect tone of pained middle-class cynicism in his reading of The End of The Affair by Graham Greene. It is a brutal book told largely in the first person by a man, Maurice Bendrix who is so frustrated with his life that he frames this story as “a record of hate.”

Bendrix claims to be a not quite successful author with a ‘lame leg’ that prevents him signing up for World War 2 military service. He has had an affair with a married woman, Sarah Miles, from which he has never recovered. Instead he is left questioning the very reasons for his existence, the validity of religion and the power of hate.

We think of men in the 1940s and 1950s as being buttoned up with a tight noose around their emotions that would strangle any sign of feelings or expression. Greene disproves this theory. The emotions were there, Bendrix and Sarah’s husband Henry discuss their feelings for Sarah; how they loved her and how, in Henry’s case, he was unable to sexually satisfy her.

Both men are in pain. And much of the book is immersed in pain. Pain that has its origins in emotions but manifests itself physically and psychologically and even spiritually and religiously.

Bendrix, the lover, and Sarah, the loved, question religion and how they should respond to it after their own sins and the greater sins of two world wars.

“I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love.”

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Greene’s prose is intimate and precise as Bendrix confesses his sins and his confusion. At the pivotal point in the story (and the affair), Bendrix and Sarah are making love when a siren warns of an air raid.

“…we saw our first robot. It passed low over the Common and we took it for a plane on fire and its odd deep bumble for the sound of an engine out of control. A second came and then a third.”

The ‘robot’ Greene describes is a GermanV-1 rocket, the pre-cursors of today’s cruise missiles, 2500 of which hit London in nine months from March 1944.

At this point Bendrix, and maybe Sarah, are beyond care.

“We had only just lain down on the bed when the raid started. It made no difference. Death never mattered in those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes…”

When there appears to be a lull in the bombardment, Bendrix leaves the bedroom to check on his landlady in the basement. A V-1 lands nearby blowing in the front door and burying him below it.

The truth about this event is discovered in parts. Bendrix believes that when Sarah discovers him she is unsympathetic. It is revealed separately that Sarah has prayed that Bendrix is alive but she believes that if her prayer is answered then the existence of God will be proven and, therefore, her current behaviour as an unfaithful mistress will be wrong in His eyes.

It is a beautifully constructed, self-defeating and painful conundrum to conjure. There can be no winner - only pain. And this pain leads to a kind of madness driven by the emotional situation and the trauma of the Second World War, of years of nightly bombing, of losing friends, family and streets, of rations and revelations.

After the War, Britain wanted to move on, move forward; the country voted out Winston Churchill and elected a Labour Government who built the National Health Service and the Welfare State promising care from cradle to grave. The working class did not return to service in grand houses but wanted to work for themselves. The established order, including religion was challenged - in fact Bendrix ia a confirmed atheist. The perfect articulation and authoritative tones of the time should not be mistaken for traditionalism or conservatism.

In the middle part of the book we read Sarah’s diary that Bendrix has surreptitiously obtained. She is seeking a better understanding of God and religion and morality. She seeks out a rationalist, Mr Smythe, who preaches a secular, intellectual view of society rejecting religious dogma and superstition.

She debates Catholicism which even in mid-century Britain was viewed with some suspicion; a left over from the anti-Papism of the Reformation. But obtaining the diary does not provide Bendrix with solace. It drives his hate, which in turn becomes his overpowering emotion; hence a “record of hate.”

Hate has consumed Bendrix; hate of Sarah for belonging to Henry; hate of Henry for being married to Sarah and, after she dies, hate of God for allowing all of this to happen.

My view is that much of this hate is derived from self-loathing and this is the key to Bendrix’ personality. He is unable to join the war effort due to his disability so does this make him feel less of a man? His books do not achieve not the best selling success he wishes for which reduces his self view further - although he takes Sarah to the cinema at one point to watch a big screen adaptation of one of his works but is unsatisfied with the Director’s vision.

So is he already deluded when the story begins? He is certainly angry that he cannot have Sarah the way Henry does. In one scene he asks her to say that she will leave Henry, that they will get married. “I knew it wasn’t true but I wanted to hear her say the words” indicating a man drowning in a whirlpool of delusion and depression.

And all of this is magnified by the war. A trauma that was never named as such and a trauma that is still working its way through British society.

These are characters whose core values have been shaken by bombs and by their own actions. In the final part of the book Henry, now a widower, invites Bendrix to live in part of his house. Both men are united in their grief over and love for Sarah. It is an odd arrangement that allows the pair to settle into a form of domesticity and acceptance; they have a schedule for each day and a form of emotional support. But they find no peace and continue to be haunted by Sarah.

In a scene that is perhaps a reflection of the author’s own conversion to and questioning of Catholicism, Henry invites a Catholic priest to dinner. Bendrix argues with the clergyman unnecessarily, becoming ever more frustrated with the prelate’s responses to challenges.

“He had the answers too pat: the amateur could never hope to catch him out, he was like a conjuror who bores one by his very skill.”

But it is the priest who openly recognises Bendrix’ pain and even allows him space to express it and receive forgiveness.

“There’s nothing we can do some of the saints haven’t done before us.”

But Bendrix is by this time too consumed by his hate and the book finishes without resolution. There is an acceptance that not all wrongs are righted and not all injustices are made good and sometimes we will be defeated.

“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.”

The End of the Affair is an exquisitely downbeat book. Its greatness comes from Greene’s writing style, that is both economic and cinematic, from the universality of its themes, lust, hate and jealousy, and how war forces us to question what we believe in and what we want from ourselves and our society.

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Have you read The End of the Affair or other books by Graham Greene? Let me know what you thought and what I should read next in the comments.

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I listened to the Bolinda Audio unabridged version of The End of the Affair narrated by Michael Kitchen through the BorrowBox app.

The author Graham Greene was notoriously shy about giving interviews. However, when he passed the BBC Late Show dug out an interview he had given to German TV. it forms part of this appreciation of the man and his work:

Late Show Graham Greene Special

Toby Hennessy is an unreliable narrator. Not because he is scheming or dissimilating but because he is actually, cognitively unreliable. This confusion is at the heart of Tana French’s dark, dynamic and twisting novel The Wych Elm.

The story is told from Toby’s perspective. He is a nice guy, from a nice middle class family in Dublin who works in PR for an art gallery, went to a private school and, ten years later, he still hangs around with his two best mates from his teenage years.

“I've always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person."

For luck, we might read privileged. He has a wealthy family in the professions, he is good looking, white, male and even plays rugby well. Toby is not used to having to calculate outcomes because they will always be positive. Sure, he knows that there are people with less good fortune (or actual fortune), but he is also convinced that he has luck on his side. In a way he is right: he is lucky to be born into the family he is part of.

And we kind of like him in his middle of the road inoffensiveness. He’d never be the CEO of a company but he would definitely be on the board, probably drive a Porsche and have an executive box at the rugby. Toby’s mistake is to believe that his perceived luck is a force field protecting him from danger and preventing him from causing harm.

The veneer is slightly scratched when Toby’s self belief gets in the way of ethics at his art gallery job. And for readers this episode should be read as a warning from the writer that this book has more hidden hazards than a city at night because while Toby’s error is forgiven, his colleague and co-conspirator is fired; ‘basically a lucky person.’

Toby is the victim of a vicious assault by burglars leaving him comatose and with a serious head injury. His perception is warped, his memory is fragmented and the reader is disorientated. Who was the attractive brunette in the pub who smiled at Toby? Why did his girlfriend Melissa not insist that he go straight to her place? And was the fact that Toby was beaten senseless by a gift from Melissa somehow symbolic?

Toby’s injuries mean he cannot return to work nor can he clearly remember what happened or communicate what he thinks. While Detectives begin their investigation into his attackers, Toby recuperates at The Ivy House, a family property (lucky), where his Uncle Hugo, a genealogist lives. The place has a history because it is where Toby and his cousins spent their summer holidays and where the whole family gathers every Sunday for lunch.

Uncle Hugo is also suffering from terminal brain cancer and the duo are joined in the house by the ever wonderful Melissa who works full time and helps to care for both men.

We also meet the cousins, Susanna and Leon who are both are stripped of layers of artifice by the end of the book.

But something darker has entered with the family. There is Toby’s fear. Tana French pitches the reader into the novelty of Toby’s screaming fear that rears up from his reduced abilities. He is scared of walking because others will see his limp, scared of talking because others will hear his slurred speech but worst of all he is scared that this state is now his life.

“…what if I never got another day in my life when I was normal again?”

In the garden there is an old Wych Elm tree, everyone has played on and around it. While the grownups are discussing who Hugo will leave the house to when he dies, Susanna’s young children discover a skull in its trunk and we are wrong footed again.

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We had thought that this book would be an investigation into who attacked Toby. Maybe it would reveal the dodgy stuff he had done or how somebody had held a secret grudge. Instead the writer moves the whole plot up a gear, increasing the intensity and the stakes because the skull belongs to a body, the rest of which is also inside the tree. The remains are of Dominic Ganly, who was a schoolfriend of the cousins.

Tana French changes everything at this moment. Because Toby is no longer who he was, everyone else adapts who they are in relation to him. This further destabilises Toby and by extension the reader. Toby’s role as the confident, successful one has been replaced and he is now the one everyone has to speak slowly or make allowances for.

French is not using these characteristics to whip up sympathy; she is using them to destabilise the reader. When the story looked to be about memory gaps, we discover it is about something much more fundamental; how our memories are intrinsically linked to our identities. French shows us, life events that the characters have lived together but that have left strikingly different memories.

What Toby learns through a pharmaceutical haze is that, although he was very close to his cousins, none of them shared the same memories or experiences. Now as well as being an unreliable narrator, Toby is a self doubting narrator; his own story may not be what he thought and he might not be the man he believes he is.

This makes us question Toby’s memories; are they distorted because of his injury or was his experience so different that it has affected his memories or, most frightening of all, is he lying?At his lowest moment Toby also discovers a darkness in himself that he was unaware of.

He finishes the book changed. Not a different character but one with a deeper sense of who he is and what he is capable of.

French uses tension to drive the novel’s pace and force the reader to turn the page compulsively. Her skill is also in knowing when to let us breathe for a moment with some beautiful prose.

After the Ivy House’s garden is torn to shreds by the police searching for forensic evidence and a lifetime of memories are turned to mud Toby reflects:

“We stood there for a long time, while the birds and the insects went about their business and the leftover raindrops ticked in the trees. The air was thin and chilly and the light was turning grey, but none of us could seem to find a reason to move.”

When a character passes away in a hospital, there has already been drama and a crash team and noise.

“Then all the sharp intricate peaks on the monitor smoothed out to clean straight lines and my father made a terrible growling sound, but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.”

The Wych Elm is a haunting book. The first person narration draws you in much like Jonathan Harker’s in the first part of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the narrator trying to make sense of a situation that he does not understand before realising the horrible truth. Both Toby and Harker suffer the loss of protection afforded them by their assumed privilege or luck. Both men fear they are being driven mad by someone else’s scheming and pyschological manipulation. Which maybe they are.

The question posed at the end Tana French’s book is whether Toby has really changed. French leaves us with the frightening possibility that his only development is an increased ability to better hide from himself, his memories and his own identity. Despite everything, Toby still believes in his own luck because he has to.

“I think it (my luck) was the gem glittering at the fount of me, colouring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I?”

Have you read The Wych Elm? What did you think? Leave me a comment and let me know.

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The Wych Elm by Tana French is published by Penguin

Hear Tana French discuss the book on The BBC Bookclub (link takes you to Apple Podcasts).

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London Fields shows how little of our world has changed since 1989. Martin Amis identified where we were stuck and those blockages are still recognisable 37 years later. This is a book that fascinates, intrigues and disgusts. It may even offend.

Salman Rushdie once said that the opening of your novel needs to let the reader know what kind of book they are about to read. The opening lines of London Fields by Martin Amis do exactly that.

“This is a true story but I can’t believe it’s really happening.

It’s a murder story too.I can’t believe my luck”

The setting is West London in 1999 and the first chapter narrator is an American writer, Samson Young, who is suffering a decade-long case of writer’s block and moves to London as some kind of cure. He is also dying of a terminal illness.

Through Samson we meet Keith Talent who is “…a very bad guy. You might even say he was the worst guy.” Keith is a conman, a wife beater, a serial philanderer, potentially a pedophile and is also mad about darts. Doesn’t he sound like the kind of guy that you want to spend 400 odd pages with? Funnily enough he is compelling.

We also meet rich banker, Guy Clinch, who is married to Hope with whom he has a toddler called Marmaduke who is a violent monster. There is a constant rotation of nannies, babysitters and nurses and injuries to Guy’s body. Clinch is that terrible English literature creation; wealthy and weak.

The final principal character is Nicola Six. She is the story’s siren; beautiful, clever and an expert seductress who can call men to her. She is also clairvoyant and believes that she has foreseen her own murder which is the basis for the narrator’s next book.

They come together in a West London pub called The Black Cross which is at once dangerous and welcoming. There are characters here; chancers, fighters and thieves with names, nicknames and pseudonyms.

The whole story takes place under a shadow of an impending global crisis which would be climate breakdown, nuclear destruction or political mayhem. The world is also hurtling towards the Millennium which whipped up its own hysteria.

Principal amongst these is Nicola Six’s fear of turning 35 on 5th November 1999. For non-UK readers, November 5th is Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes night when fires are lit and fireworks launched in celebration of the discovery of a Catholic plot to blowup Parliament.

Nicola wants to die before she loses her looks, before she becomes something less than desirable, before her effect on the male gaze fades and she is left as what? How many women have been made to feel that there is no life after 35? And now, nearly 40 years after the book was first published, have we really developed?

London Fields is a dark book about working class life and middle class shallowness. It is cynical without being sneering and fantastical without being fanciful.

Amis describes working class life without getting all ‘ooh look at the oiks’ or ‘gor blimey guv’nor’ Mary Poppins about it. This is life as it happens in the smokey boozer, the damp lockup used for darts practice and the council flat too small to house a family. The people and the situations might seem grotesque or exaggerated and, that word again, offensive.

But I believe that the book is only as offensive as life. It presents misogyny, racism, crime and even suspicions of child abuse; all of which also exist outside the slightly surreal world of this novel. But Amis uses these subjects to demonstrate a kind of violent futility to the way many people have to live; Keith Talent because he is poor and Guy Clinch because he is rich.

It would be easy also to laugh at Keith Talent. Amis expertly uses dark comedy to express Keith but is never sneering at him. I think he shows Keith as a byproduct of a society ruled by an elite. In the 60s and 70s there was a chance for the working class to break free from the pre-war shackles of class but by the end of the 80s, thanks to Thatcherism, the workers were shattered. Education became a system of certification rather than a tool of improvement.

Keith’s passion is poured into playing darts, the philosophy of darts and the opportunity the sport offers him to break out. Darts (and football) were always working class pursuits.

But darts has been purchased by the TV channels to sell back to the proletariat. We see this in London Fields through Keith’s journey to the televised Sparrow Masters darts final. His language around sports is all based on sports commentators; he no longer has his own way to express what he feels about darts because that language has been bought by broadcasters.
In London Fields, the various rounds of the darts contest are played in pubs but the final is played in a TV studio with fake cigarette smoke, fake crowd sounds and a fake bar where the contestants are interviewed.

“They said they’d put the sound on later, that inimitable pub bustle, the whoops, the laughter, the crack of glass"…”

The casual violence and crime associated with nights out at The Black Cross are removed, erased and tossed aside. All risk eliminated. No booze, no fags, no fuck all; a middle class, middle England version of a working class institution. Exactly what the Premier League did with football during Covid; the crowd sound was dubbed on for the TV audience.

And the book was written 40 years ago but already Amis saw the direction of travel, saw the ruptures caused by Thatcher and Reagan and graphically wrote about them.

The book is also incredibly prescient in other ways especially when Amis talks about America.

“For some time now I have thought it possible to believe that America was going insane. In her own way. And why not?”

He writes about the country’s neuroses;

“like when she tried giving up drink, like when she started finding enemies within, like when she thought she could rule the world: but she had always gotten better. But now she was going insane ..”

I found that this resonated the loudest all these decades later:

“In a way she was never like anywhere else. Most places just are something, but America had to mean something too, hence her vulnerability - to make-believe, to false memory, false destiny. And finally it looked as though the riveting struggles with illusion was over and America had lost.”

This passage could have been written in 2026. It comes like a philosophical digression at the start of a chapter but Amis harks back to American life through conversations with Sam’s agent in the US, and snippets of observations that could have come straight out of his earlier book, Money. And, of course, when America sneezes the world catches a cold; or at least until it decides to clear the room.

London Fields is a book that jumps about into and out of reality and fantasy. It is a book that will make you laugh one moment and take a step back the next through shock and perhaps disgust.

There is also wonderful prose here too. When Samson is flying into London at the beginning of the book:

“Shaken awake to a sticky bun at 1:30am in the morning my time, I moved to a window seat and watched through the bright mists the fields forming their regiments, in full parade order, the sad shires, like an army the size of England.”

In the end it is this quality of writing and the depth of thought that makes London Fields such an essential read. It is a book that has an opinion and a viewpoint that helps us make better sense of how our world is today and how it got be that way. Maybe we have finally caught up with Martin Amis.

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London Fields by Martin Amis is published in the UK and Ireland by Penguin

It can also be bought from the evil Amazon empire HERE

Have you read London Fields? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.

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Every corner of my garden has been born again as a book. My flower beds, drainage ditches and trees have become literary versions of “where were you when?” This winter I began listening to books while clearing away fallen trees, unblocking drainage ditches and preparing for spring I took audiobooks along as companions.

At the bottom of the garden there once stood wooden kennels for eight dogs which were built on bright concrete hardstanding. The building went to our neighbours to use for their geese and over the base I have built new flower beds and woven a wattle fence from chopped down branches. This area will forever be John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People Spy interpreted by Simon Vance.

It is a suitably dark edge of the garden. Not visible from the road and under the shade of a giant pine tree, it leads into wild forest where a clear summer stream becomes a furious winter river.

The ground appears solid and welcoming but underneath the carpet of brown pine needles it is dark boggy porridge. This all seemed perfectly appropriate for tales of George Smiley and the slow motion horrors of espionage.

Mr Vance applies the perfect edge of cynicism and secrecy to his narration that draws us in to a world that is dark even under the warm afternoon sun. Along 25 metres of chainlink fence squeezed onto the far bank of a stream, hangs the memory of Smiley’s surgical, soul destroying interrogation of Ostrakov. Toby Esterhase’s light Hungarian accent hangs from the branches of the overhanging trees and Ostrakov’s bluster and surrender flow gently from an underground source and downhill towards the ocean bound river.

In the middle of the garden a large overgrown area was spilling over onto the grass. From its edges peeked yellows and reds. With Liz Nugent’s Unravelling Oliver as my partner I removed the masking weeds and gorse and revealed a flower bed underneath.

The book starts with impact.

“I expected more of a reaction the first time I hit her.” Is the first line. It stands up with “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It scratches at our skin like brambles causing us to pause before scything our way through to discover the genius underneath.

This extraordinary piece of crime fiction features no hardbitten detective or obsessed forensics expert. No angry Chief demanding the return of a gun and badge.

Instead it takes us through Oliver’s life from several perspectives; each chapter a different voice (in a literary and literal sense), giving us their version of the story.

Like the marsh grass that I had to dig out with fork, shovel and scythe there are secrets and twists in this story that remain stuck in place, only giving themselves up towards the end of the story. But with much less effort.

The twists jump up on us.

While cutting down a metre high copse of weeds, something moved, quickly. I jerked backwards, shouted, checked that nobody saw me and then advanced slowly to locate the pair of frogs that I might have caught with my garden fork. They looked at me, let me examine them from above and then vanished into the low green thicket.

I felt the same with Nugent’s revelations about Oliver’s origins and how they played out. I had to remove my grubby gardening gloves, rewind the story a few minutes and stand still under dark clouds to listen again to what I thought I had heard.

Nugent has shown what is possible with a crime thriller. She gives us the crime, she even tells us who did it and how. But the most fascinating part of a crime is always the criminal’s motive which grows in width, depth and horror. And when we discover why the crime was committed, the writer makes us think that we might be on firm ground. But, just like a garden left too long, there are dark, spiky surprises amongst the smiling primroses and the ending might not be what you expected.

My most recent task was to convert an area of untouched grass on a sunny slope into a flowerbed. Randomly Tessa Hadley’s brilliant The Party was next on my list. Two sisters, Moira and Evelyn, are the protagonists in a coming of age story set in 1950s Bristol.

There is a link between the two sisters discovering more about lives and themselves and the discoveries I made about plant types and flowering seasons. But I’m not going to labour it.

The Party, read by the author, is a wonderful piece of storytelling. Without sound effects, music or changes of cast, I was placed in the Bristol docks, in a rundown pub with the sisters peeing on the floor of an empty room (“Men could go outside and pee into the docks”), and in their family home.

Hadley also draws in the subtle biases and closed doors of class in England. The way the wealthy have their own codes and behaviours, how their taste in music or fashion remains static. At a party in an upper-middle class house, the rich young things listen to their parents’ old records on the record player, they dress up as their aunts and uncles and they behave in a manner that is inherited rather than developed.

There is the power of a posh voice, an upmarket address or expensive car that contrasts with having to find a bus stop to get home, or completing school homework in the Seaman’s Mission while waiting for your father to finish work.

The story of how they find new ways to relate to each other as women rather than girls is written beautifully but without flourish. The sisters’ lives are on the cusp of change, their family life too and, on a bigger scale, so is the country.

By the end of my second listen to the book I had planted a salvia, hebe, roses, rosemary and a lilac tree in a chevron of small rectangular beds. The view from my living room is now slightly altered and, with time, will continue change and grow more colourful. Much like the lives of Moira and Evelyn.

Books take us to new places, stories transport us and allow us to experience emotions, challenges and situations. As well as taking us away they ground us, they stay with us in our souls and in our physical world. Think about the book you read on a long train journey and how station names flashing past remind you of specific chapters, how the landscape opened up when the train left the city and the heroine broke free.

This morning I planted three geraniums in my new flower bed; two red and one pink. Over my shoulder were two young women, sisters, enjoying the excitement of their new grown up lives and looking forward to what adulthood would bring. I know they will be there for me every time those flowers bloom.

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Coming soon the John Buchan classic The Thirty Nine Steps and Louise Doughty’s A Bird In Winter. Two books written a hundred years apart that both feature spies escaping to Scotland.

Milkman by Anna Burns is a dense and powerful book set in the Troubles. Characters have unconventional names, there is little white space on the page and it requires much of the reader. But is it worth it?

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In the early ‘90s Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse created the comedy characters Smashey and Nicey. They were outdated celebrity DJs on Fab FM who hadn't changed their schtick since the 60s. They operated in a delusional and absurdist world that owes as much to Beckett, Stoppard and Pinter as it did to Dick Emery and Monty Python. One of their conversations came to mind when reading Milkman by Anna Burns.

DJ NICE: What happens Smashy if you go around to a young friend’s house for a night out and he’s having a night in? Does that qualify as a night out or a night in?

DJ SMASH: Well, that’s an interesting one. Mmm, because it’s sort of in for him but out for you and yet you’re both sharing the same experience in a quite literally uncanny way.

(See the whole sketch here When is a night out, a night in?)

Milkman is original and unique in its style. There are also digressions and loops and dense, thick pages of writing with minimal paragraphs and no let-up in their intensity or questioning.

“It was as if there was nothing there, when there was something there, while at the same time as if there was something there when there was nothing there.”

When are you out when you are also in?

The book drops us into the claustrophobia of a certain (unnamed) Belfast Catholic neighbourhood during the Troubles with an 18-year-old woman known only as middle sister as our guide. Through her experiences we feel the weight of social, political and personal pressures placed on the population by the two warring sides (‘the renouncers’ and ‘the defenders’).

None of the characters in the book have conventional names, instead we get ‘wee sisters’, ‘maybe-boyfriend’, ‘tablets girl’ and ‘Somebody McSomebody’. This is a strong stylistic choice that talks to the depersonalisation felt by individuals during times of military occupation. It also forces the reader to collaborate with the coded thinking of the place. The security service’s confusion between Milkman and the real milkman is both tragic and darkly comic.

Adding to middle sister’s pressure is the fact that she is being intensely stalked by an older man known as Milkman. He does not work with dairy products but is a ranking member of a terrorist organisation and the fact that he has been seen talking with middle sister then creates a whole other chain of rumours that an affair is happening.

The reader is placed in a reality this is at once horrible and horrific while also possessing an absurdist quality in which everything seems futile. Middle sister talks about why her neighbours wouldn’t marry the person they really loved because that person might be violently taken away from them at any moment. Surely, the logic goes it is better to marry someone who you won’t miss that much.

Milkman is hard work. There were times when I felt that Burns could have used fewer pages to get across her point. And then, like middle sister, I would question myself; ‘Is she writing this way because this was how it felt to live like this?’

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The Troubles were brutal for everyone. If you stepped outside of whatever the line was, you risked serious physical harm from being kneecapped or tarred and feathered to being tortured and shot. And this was by your own people. On the other side there were those opposed to your very existence as well as the ‘security forces’ who tracked movements and took photos.

Middle sister recounts all the times she hears the click of a camera in bushes and behind trees. She was subject to observation from the state, the ‘renouncers’ , her own community and then by Milkman.

After several violent episodes, near deaths and deaths, the book takes on a lighter tone. From about page 300 of 348, Anna Burns shows us a wonderful comic touch. Middle sister’s widowed Ma is rediscovering herself as a romantic interest and middle sister with her three wee sisters are trying to help her.

Meanwhile, all the young girls in the neighbourhood are out in the street playing at being ballroom dancers due to the success of ‘international couple’ who are a local pair of world champions (and maybe-boyfriend’s parents).

Burns is hilarious describing how the little girls dress up in their big sisters’ clothes, put on their big sisters’ makeup and fall over in the street because their big sisters’ shoes are too big.

The international couple’s success means that they can be celebrated by both sides in the conflict. Who knew that ballroom dancing could be such a powerful tool for world peace? And who also knew that even in the direst situation, human beings have the capacity to find absurdist joy?

In Milkman, Anna Burns has created a cast of incredible characters, a deeply detailed and emotionally stifling setting and asked questions about military occupation, entrenched beliefs and how men use power against women. She forces us to confront what The Troubles really meant for ordinary people trying to work in offices, fix cars and deliver milk. There is no flinching, no glorification or heroics.

Brighton-based Ms Burns was the first Northern Irish winner of the Man Booker Prize. Booker’s chair of judges, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah described Milkman as “challenging, but in the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging. It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top,”

The climbing Snowdon comparison is not quite apt because there is also a train to take you to the summit of the mountain. Once there you enjoy the same views as those who walked to the peak but this book offers no similar alternative; you either get your head down and work at it or miss out completely.

However, Milkman is an exceptional feat of writing that left me in awe of Burns’ ability and style even if the book left me asking why she had made it so hard to read. But maybe that was the point.

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Milkman by Anna Burns won the 2018 Booker Prize and is published by Faber & Faber.

For other books set in The Troubles check out Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

or my review of Harry's Game by Gerald Seymour. Both offer a more traditional style of storytelling and both are powerful reminders of the futility of sectarianism and the horrors of military occupation.

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What should we do with young offenders? In every country there is pearl clutching, demands for ever tougher punishment and political class that wants to sweep poor kids under the rug. Francesca Maria Benvenuto lifts the rug. Please consider a subscription which will support my writing and give you access to hundreds more reviews, interviews, articles, short stories, podcasts and videos.

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Naples is a city of contradictions. It has given us some of the world’s most beautiful songs; O Solé Mio, Torna a Surriento and Malafemmena. And the view from Santa Lucia across the Bay of Naples to the threatening shadow of Vesuvius with the city jammed up behind you and the blue water opening up in front is stunning.

The city’s bellezza also has its dark dramatic side. The volcano ready to erupt and rain down ash, molten rock and tragedy on the manic streets and crowded alleyways. It is the poorest city in Italy with over half of young people unemployed and the grabbing, violent fingers of the Camorra mafia inserted into every aspect of its being.

The city is chaotic and beautiful, blessed and damned, and I have been in love with it since my first visit in 1994. I bought my first proper suits there, ate the best pizza ever made and never once felt scared or threatened. But maybe I never wandered through Forcella after dark. And it is these contradictions that form the heart of So People Know It’s Me, the debut novel by Italian writer Francesca Maria Benvenuto.

The book’s narrator, Zeno, was born and raised in Forcella. It is described in tourism talk as ‘vibrant, historic, characteristic,’ with a footnote about exploring after sun down.

Zeno is 15 years old and in prison. His life might be viewed as a result of poverty; parental abuse, petty crime, prison. However, poverty means that he has nowhere to fall from or to once he is arrested and imprisoned for killing another kid who had been sent to kill him.

We learn about Zeno’s life through an extended letter he writes to a teacher who inspires him in prison. He refers to her as ‘Teach’ throughout and shares his life story, his hopes and his gradually developing dreams for his future.

Zeno is in many ways Naples itself. A dichotomy, a beauty and a beast. As he describes himself:

“I’m real bad. But not on the inside. I’m bad on the outside, cause I done real ugly things. But these things stay on the outside…I ain’t the things I done…The judges, they never understood.”

He is sentenced to the maximum possible by a system that cares less about rehabilitation and more about punishment. A poor kid shot another poor kid, it’s terrible and we need to lock ’em up. This is no more than Zeno expects. He knows how the system works, he knows that the wealthier have proper lawyers and that with his abusive father in jail and his mother working as a prostitute, his potential outcomes are limited.

His jail is Nisida. An island in the Bay of Naples that allows him views across the sea; the kind of views tourists and the wealthy would pay millions for. But whereas the sea represents travel and new horizons for many, for Zeno it imprisons him.

“The sea’s useless here at Nisida…And you won’t even let us swim in the sea,’ cause you think we’ll try and escape.”

Benvenuto’s prose is dynamic. She gives us the impression of a stream of consciousness, of a young man wanting to tell us everything he knows, but structures and balances the story perfectly.

We believe in Zeno as a character and as a boy who is capable of change. He is excited by Christmas when he will be able to spend a couple of days at home, by the thought of seeing his “slightly cross eyed” innamurata Natalina and by the food he will get to eat. At the same time he is still a killer and a thief. And this is where the author is so skilful; we like Zeno in the same way that we like Dickens’ Artful Dodger; he’s a criminal but what else does the world allow him to become?

So People Know It’s Me is a plea for society to try harder, to look deeper into the causes of repeated criminality and to remedy situations that prevent escape from the underworld. Benvenuto hints at the North / South divide in Italy; half of young people in Naples (53%), are unable to find work but a few hundred kilometres North in Milan, there are 115,000 millionaires and the average salary is more than double that of Naples. Zeno knows there is money around and we realise that the problem isn’t financial, it’s political.

At 15 years old Zeno already understands class, power and wealth inequality. There is a telling scene when one of Zeno’s fellow prisoners protects him just by mentioning his surname;

“My name’s Corrado Palumbo and if the name Zeno means something to you, mine’s gotta mean even more… Palumbo means something to everyone of us.”

Francesca Maria Benvenuto’s debut novel is raw, it picks at a spot until it bleeds. It gives you a tissue of hope that is never enough to cover the wound and stop the flow. The book demands your attention, your thought and maybe even your action.

So People Know It’s Me (Che si sappia a chi sono.) by Francesca Maria Benvenuto, translated into English by Elizabeth Harris) is available from Pushkin Press

Thank you Net Galley and Pushkin Press for the review copy of this book.

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My debut collection of short stories, Love Hangover, is available to download HERE

Seán Farrell’s debut novel Frogs for Watchdogs is published in the UK this month. With this in mind I went back to revisit my review from last year’s original Irish publication. To support my writing and received creative reviews, interviews and new fiction please consider taking out a subscription.

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Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell.

I was in a writing group with two authors who write books that are aimed at children. Their skill at transforming words into rhythms, and shapes that sound fun when spoken aloud is dazzling. I never really know what feedback to offer them when they read because I don’t have kids and have no idea what they want or need.

With this in mind, I came to Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell a little dubious because the book is written from the perspective of an 8 year old boy. His Irish father, an actor, has abandoned the family and the lad lives with his English mother and older sister in insecure accommodation.

The mother arranges house sit to an idyllic and isolated farmhouse in rural Ireland. She is also a healer and takes on the challenge of proving that she can survive alone with the children, although the older sister is sent away to private school courtesy of the woman’s wealthy English parents. For the young boy this is the start of an adventure.

Far from being a Swallows and Amazons type tale of derring do and middle class manners, Frogs for Watchdogs digs into the details and obsessions that can rattle around a young mind. As grown ups we dismiss the thoughts we had as kids and reject them as silly.

Likewise, children are told to ‘stop being silly’ and the fullness of what they thought is forgotten. Farrell’s writing reminds us how, as children, we craft detailed, multi-faceted stories to explain the world.

As grown ups we forget them and remember instead the stories that were told to us by adults - thunder is caused be the clouds banging together, the tooth fairy or Father Christmas. But what happens to the stories we create ourselves? Are they still tucked away dormant in our brains?

There is a song by Argentinean singer Diego Torres called Donde Van which means ‘where do they go.’

Dónde van las luces que no duermen
Y las palabras que
Nunca llegaron al papel

Roughly ‘where do they go, the lights that don’t sleep, and the words that never make it to the paper.’ I would ask the same question about the stories we create as children.

The young boy in Frogs for Watchdogs is not just making up fairy stories. He creates a detailed murder plan for local farm worker Jerry Drain who he sees capturing some of his mother’s affections; even at eight years old fear feeds male territorial desires.

“If the crows call two times I’ll kill him. But if they only call once then he lives. Crows don’t make birdsong, they speak out and if you listen hard it’s either a double or single call they end with. They’ll tell me if today is the day. When he comes his engine will be louder than the crows, but I’ll listen and I’ll know what to do.

The place to stab is in the neck straight away. I’ll land on the roof behind the cab. He won’t know I’m there, and when he climbs out, he won’t have time to look left or right afor I’m on top of him.’

The various plans fail and the last is discovered by his sister. It is this discovery that fixes the thought; when the story is remembered jointly it become a memory - ‘Do you remember when you were a kid and tried to murder Jerry Drain?’ Or maybe his sister (and Jerry Drain), will remember it more than the boy and when, as an adult, he is faced with their questions about his plan, he may no longer recall it.

Frogs for Watchdogs could be considered a cautionary tale about the damage caused to young lives by careless adults. But more it is a celebration of the imaginative power we all have when we are young, the power to create stories that explain our world. Where does that skill go? Like the lights that don’t sleep and the words that never make it to the paper.

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Frogs For Watchdogs the debut novel by Sean Farell is published by New Island Books. Find out more and order your copy HERE

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In the UK the book is published by John Murray Press. Find out more and order your copy HERE

The book is also reviewed in The Guardian

Do you have to enjoy puzzles to enjoy the Golden Age crime genre? As Michael Edwards Hemlock Bay is published in the US, I consider a literary style that has never been at the top of my must read list. To support my work please consider taking out a subscription.

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Thank you to Net Galley and Poisoned Pen Press for the ARC

Across the UK and Ireland there are over 150 operating Heritage Railways attracting over 10 million visitors annually. Some are so successful that they link up to regular train services proving that Beeching (in the UK), was badly mistaken. The attraction for visitors is steam engines; running on coal, belching smoke, soot and steam these locomotives nevertheless exude personality and humanity.

They remind British people that the country wasn’t always in continual decline. Once upon a time there were British engineers, inventors and steam trains criss-crossing the country. Passengers left from well kept stations staffed by men in suits and ties who were probably carrying a gold pocket watch and who would say things like “It’s the Cheltenham Spa Express” or “All aboard the Lyme Regis Branch.” They would never say ‘See it, Say it, Sorted.’

The love of Heritage Railways expresses a deep yearning for the past that is almost fetishised in the UK. There is talk of ‘a simpler time’ which ignores rife sexual and racial discrimination, class inequality and the rampant diseases of poverty in this imagined golden Albion of yesteryear. For example, in 1931 25% of the population of major railway town York was described by the national census as living in primary poverty.

But if you can ignore all of this and pretend that you might have been a member of the landed gentry a hundred years ago then I am not going to crush your dreams.

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In literature this same deep desire is expressed through the genre of Golden Age crime novels. This style of writing requires a book’s plot to be constructed like a puzzle with clues, red herrings and sometimes even a Cluefinder at the end for readers keen to follow the writer’s thought process.

Agatha Christie is the doyenne, and patron saint of Golden Age crime writing which is why so much of modern day writing in the style is set in the 1920s and 1930s. While Martin Edwards’ latest novel Hemlock Bay is unashamedly a Golden Age book, it also gently warps some of the assumptions of the period with same sex and mixed race couples together with a very on the nose comment about the House of Lords:

“He was given a knighthood, the ultimate seal of respectability. ‘Or badge of corruption, depending on your point of view’”

So while our lead investigator Rachel Savernake, has domestic staff, this is excused by the fact that, according to Edwards, their relationship appears more friendly. Savernake is of course fabulously wealthy (through inheritance), but is also very keen to see justice done. In her world justice and the confines of the law do not always sit easily together. But she is young, clever, attractive and rich.

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In the book Miss Savernake and her entourage decamp from their central London mansion to the North West of England to a newly built resort called Hemlock Bay because there is murder in the air. She has bought an impressionist painting that depicts a person dead under the cliffs at the resort. Additionally a Welsh fortune teller has approached tabloid journalist, and Rachel’s friend, Jacob Flint to say that a murder is about to be committed in the same place but he is unable to say who the killer or intended victim are. The reader also learns that a mild-mannered accountant from Guildford wants to kill someone he has never met (it’s always the quiet ones).

There are soon murders to investigate, characters to meet and the wonderful resort of Hemlock Bay to explore; including its daring nudist area guarded by a man with a dog.

Martin Edwards has cleverly pieced together the various parts of the plot’s jigsaw dropping us clues and sending us up blind alleys but it is a very specific style. While the sequence of events and the scenery are beautifully evoked it feels as though the complexity of the plotting leads to a simplification of the characters.

Rachel Savernake is aloof and guarded for reasons that the reader never learns.

“Rachel guarded her privacy with a ruthless zeal…”

Edwards tells us in Chapter Three which leaves him with the problem of finding a way for his protagonist to drop her guard so we can get to know her which doesn’t quite happen. Rachel is described as attractive and wealthy, she easily flirts with other women and is much admired by many eligible men but she forms no romantic attachment? Why is this?

When Flint, the journalist, finds a murder victim brutally battered to death;

“Blood leaked on to the rush matting from a terrible wound in his temple. A few inches away was the murder weapon, streaked with dark stains.”

It is a wonderful description of the scene (and there is more where that came from), but how does Flint feel about it? Did he vomit? Did he need to sit down? Get some air? Have nightmares? It seems he just reports what he sees and cracks on with filing his report. Talk about the era of the stiff upper lip!

Likewise when wrong doers are unmasked or murdered we never discover what drove them to crime in the first place, what part of their personality triggered the impulse. We understand what the circumstances were that led Rachel to reveal the criminal but it is all just that; circumstantial. The fact that someone did a particular job might make them a person of interest but it doesn’t prove anything - except in Golden Age crime where you are judged due to your job, social status, or your Great Aunt Marjorie’s political persuasion.

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In this genre the accusations have complete certainty if they are presented by a posh person. At the end of the book there are two chapters of what author Ken Follett calls the “Tell me Inspector” trope. Rachel’s presentation takes place in a hotel’s smoking room rather than round a stately home dinner table but it is the same concept; tell the reader the solution rather than let them discover it through reading the book.

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, George Smiley solves the tricky puzzle of unmasking a traitor in the British spy headquarters. Instead of a ‘Tell me Inspector’ scene Smiley is waiting in the dark in his stockinged feet to confront the traitor in the next room. We know he is 99% certain who he will discover but it is not until the door is opened that there is confirmation. The tension is relieved for the character and the reader simultaneously; in Golden Age we are waiting for a (posh) person to explain to us how everything worked.

I’m not sure that such intricate plotting allows the characters to breathe and take unexpected turns. The cast can tend towards archetypes in order to make all the pieces fit and this can make the book feel quite shallow compared to more modern crime stories.

All this leads to Hemlock Bay’s main challenge; is it a novel or is it a puzzle?

I ask the question because the reading experience is different. Should this be read from the perspective of looking for clues or looking for pleasure? I was never sure if my overall pleasure was going to come from a gripping story or from being as clever as the writer and solving the mystery.

There is no journey with the investigator in Hemlock Bay. Rachel Savernake is not a sharer so the reader is unable to be with her in each moment, unable to access her emotions or doubts - if indeed she has any. Our experience, then, is to test ourselves against Rachel’s detective skills in much the same way we might with a crossword compiler.

When you travel on a Heritage Railway it is not as comfortable or as quick as a modern train ride. There is no at seat wi-fi and speeds are often limited to 20mph. The enjoyment for enthusiast comes from the fact that it is old fashioned, that they can stick their heads out of the window and see a steam engine ahead, around the carriage is marquetry work and the train guard walks up and down in a smart uniform. It is not supposed to be like a TGV or InterCity Express.

Hemlock Bay is not meant to be a modern novel, and that is its charm. If nostalgic puzzle solving is what you crave then this could be the book for you.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? Do you prefer a mystery you can solve, or a character you can feel for?"

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Hemlock Bay by Martin Edwards is published in the USA by Poisoned Pen Press on June 16th 2026

Lessons in Chemistry has enjoyed stratospheric success; within a year of being published it was already adapted for TV and had been named Barnes & Noble book of the year. Did it just represent a post-COVID moment or is there more to Bonnie Garmus’ debut novel? Check out my review below and if you would like to support my writing please consider taking out a subscription

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Have you ever started watching an expensive drama series and then drifted away around the third episode? Writers often cram so much into the start to get you hooked but then have to pad out the story to fill their contracted 10 episodes.

I started to watch the Apple TV series of Lessons in Chemistry and got through three episodes. The memory of the show has faded now, drifted away like clouds across a windy sky. There is not a scene or plot point I can honestly recall.

However, the original book by Bonnie Garmus is a different proposition. It has hit me hard and stayed with me. It has opened conversations, made me laugh and confirmed my view that rowers love to talk about rowing. All The Time. I know this because my wife is a competitive rower.

Garmus uses the norms of 1960s USA society to make much wider observations on misogyny, love and the patriarchy (and rowing). Lead character Elizabeth Zott is a chemist whose path to personal recognition, success and achievement is blocked because of her gender. Her life choices (cohabiting and having a child before marriage), cause her professional and financial turmoil.

When she becomes the host of an afternoon cooking show, her life changes. She takes the task seriously and explains food preparation through chemistry; she is not dumbing down or presenting escapism but actually educating women through her show. A chocolate brownie is dissected chemically, women take notes and the results are spectacular. Elizabeth tells women they can be successful and some of them are inspired by her to change their lives.

The more I reflect on Lessons in Chemistry the more I think it has in common with The Handmaid’s Tale. Where Margaret Atwood’s book puts us in an unknown place to show us where we are, Bonnie Garmus uses the very familiar to make the same point.

We may roll our eyes at the attitudes to women in science or be shocked at the Police response to rape but, by the end of the book we are left asking if much has changed. Even worse, there is a sense that we might be regressing as a society. Elizabeth Zott lived in a time when the only swinging was done by Sinatra at the Sands - the ‘60s was still pretty staid. Within years, the pill became available for women, and within a decade Roe vs Wade conferred women with almost the same rights over their bodies as men.

Ten years ago we would have assumed that all this was settled and there would only be further progress. Garmus picks at the 1960s and pulls a scab off 2026: Roe vs Wade undone, the rise of Christian nationalism and an explosion in the concept of Trad wives and the beliefs that go with that lifestyle.

Elizabeth Zott (and many non-fictional women), fought hard, sometimes physically, to assert their right to be treated equally. Today we see successful women belittled, insulted and threatened online for their mere presence. How many women will be discouraged from efforts to be successful by this constant harassment?

In Lessons in Chemistry Elizabeth stabs a man who is attempting to rape her and is asked by the Police to write a statement of regret. She says that her only regret is not stabbing him more. The man is her PhD mentor and the incident ends her research, her education and her chance for a Doctorate. This is still a recognisable situation.

This episode also demonstrates the writer’s incredible skill at handling dark and serious topics without sensationalism. Elizabeth is a woman who deals with facts, in many ways she is forced to forego emotional reactions in case they are called out - as many women today will also recognise. Garmus’ writing reflects this outlook; it suppresses the emotional damage, giving the book an additional tautness as Elizabeth fights to outwardly maintain control.

The book’s theme is summed up in one of Elizabeth’s first exchanges with Calvin who is the love of her life.

“The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that I can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be afforded the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect…Don’t even get me started on pay…”

Lessons in Chemistry is a political book wrapped in a beautiful love story and is intensely emotional and very funny. The writing is so clever, stylish and intelligent that it is hard to believe that this is Bonnie Garmus’ first published novel. Lessons in Chemistry poses a question that hangs over all of society; what would the world really be like if women had not been denied equal rights for so long? How many Elizabeth Zott’s are out there today?

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Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus is published by Penguin Random House in the UK

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I was attracted to Famous Once by its premise and promise to take the reader into the world of 1970s rock stars and models. There is lots going on in this short story but it was just a little too clean for me. To support my work please consider taking out a subscription.

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It’s almost the perfect prompt for a short story contest; a model and a rock star, the 1970s, a murder. Think of all the possibilities of victim, gender, relationships. The period details and attitudes that could be mined for drama and conflict, the glamour, the sex, the drugs and the rock and roll. You might research the era by reading Jenny Fabian’s Groupie or autobiographies of Rod Stewart and Keith Richards. You could examine the effects of that lifestyle on those starting families or just growing up and write about how some people fell by the wayside; the rock and roll victims.

Or you could just have your lead character reflect that “there were sex and drugs and rock and roll,” without giving any indication what it felt like to be there. Unfortunately with Famous Once, Jane Green has chosen the second option.

Green has sold millions. According to her website, over ten million copies of her books have been purchased around the world which is an incredible achievement. She is also referred to as ‘The Queen of Chick Lit’ and often compared to Helen Fielding, author of the Bridget Jones series which is one of my favourites.

For me, however, the true Queen of Chick Lit is neither Green nor Fielding but Jackie Collins. (see my thoughts on The Stud here.)

Famous Once is a short story that spans several decades. Former super model Astrid is mooching around her “sprawling country estate” in 2025 having been reminded of the time “she was once so beautiful, so famous, had such a public glamorous life. A life that everyone wanted, even when it was peppered by terrible things, tragedies, loss.”

That time was over 50 years ago when Astrid was a super model sharing a house with a girl called Birgit who likes to pee with the bathroom door open; this detail is offered for no other reason than the woman is Swedish.

That night Astrid meets famous rock star Callum Blake at Annabel’s. Callum takes Astrid from Annabel's (which at the time was the hippest London joint), to a coffee shop: she admires his dimples. They then agree to meet two days later.

This felt difficult to really accept: these are drug taking, free loving and free wheeling young people in London and not colleagues from the accounts department at Henley Borough Council worried about what their mum would say if they got in late. Why doesn’t he take her back to his Chelsea pad in his Jensen Interceptor or white Roller? Why doesn’t she wake up the next morning unsure of where she is but certain of what she has done?

This is prime Jackie Collins territory. But where Collins’ books are grown up, sexy and dirty, Green’s writing comes across as prim and sexless. Collins would have had these two between the sheets right away, rather than flashing an ankle and making a dinner date for next Wednesday.

Maybe Green knows her readers better than me and they prefer a more puritan slant to their rock god / super model love stories.

Green’s writing style in Famous Once gives the impression of being all surface and, sometimes almost junior. Lead character, Astrid could be fascinating and used to truly examine the changing role of women in society - in 1974 the Pill became universally available for free for all women. Surely this deserves mention if our lead character is a young sexually active woman - what did she think about it?

It seems again something that the reader should be immersed in. Instead, Green, like her lead character is passive, she doesn’t want to disturb or disrupt the reader, she wants to keep all her surfaces clean. Resentment, ill will and anger are not permitted to percolate, ripen or mature in Famous Once. From unfair divorce settlements and infidelity to a mother’s alcoholism, everything is forgiven and tidied up, wiped down and made to look like it never happened.

Green tries to fit everything into a short story. There is so much extraneous detail and rambling that could be cut in favour of emotion and colour.

Birgit and the open bathroom door serves no purpose. A celebration dinner for 15 that becomes a meal for 25, and even the almost entire chapter on a gallery retrospective could be cut or trimmed to give space to depth and reflection. The main focus of the story for me is how the mother and daughter strengthen their relationship. Instead it feels like a mystery death is wedged into the middle of a mother / daughter tale to give purpose or focus.

And because the mystery is not strong, the rest of the story suffers. The villain, introduced early on, is described as being a nasty person and they do something terrible. Just to be sure, Astrid’s daughter tells us that this person has connections with “East End gangsters” - you might as well include a QR code with instructions to ‘scan here for the baddy’s identity’.

There are some interesting reflections on how beauty standards vary between generations but that is undermined by one of Astrid’s contemporaries claiming that ‘beauty is for the young.’ Does Green want to have it both ways by appealing to women and then telling them that they will grow less beautiful? Is she suggesting that a woman who qualified for a Cambridge scholarship is not able to make a living for herself away from her ex-husband? Astrid is so much in debt that she is still running her events catering company from her ramshackle house in her seventies. The confusing message seems to be “ make sure you get a good divorce girls!”

The ending of Famous Once feels glib in the extreme. It is not earned or believable and makes you wonder if maybe Astrid was not treated as badly as the narrator suggested.

Famous Once has something fascinating at its heart. It could tell or teach us something, instead it fades away like an embarrassing novelty record put out by an old soap star who should have known better. It would be interesting to see Famous Once developed out into a full length book with space to breathe, reflect and get in deep.

Thank you Net Galley for the ARC

Famous Once by Jane Green an Amazon Original Story is available to download from Amazon

I would recommend this book for people who like a story told in a soapy style with little to challenge, consider or reflect on.

It’s back to 1984 and the first part of Martin Amis’ ‘London Trilogy.’ It’s an awkward and uncomfortable read that rewards the reader who sticks with it. If you would like to support The Creative Stack then please consider a subscription. Many Thanks

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In the ‘80s racism and sexism were still embedded in much of mainstream culture. The Black and White Minstrel Show toured the nation’s theatres until 1989, TV comics regularly mocked minority groups and at every school, somebody’s older brother had a loosely stapled and photocopied edition of ‘The 50 Best Racist Jokes.’

And while there were keepers of the nation’s morals such as Mary Whitehouse, trying to keep sex off the tv and bare breasts out of newspapers, pornography was pretty readily available. Every newsagents, petrol station and even some Post Offices had a top shelf (or two) of porn mags. Dads kept mags in their bedside cabinets, movies in the attic and later VHS tapes in sock drawers and wardrobes.

The third part of the 80s trifecta came with Thatcherism; it was an obsession with money. Making it, having it, spending it, being seen with it and focussing on its accumulation.

This is the world that Martin Amis is writing about in Money: A Suicide Note. The lead character, John Self, is a nasty piece of work who spends his life drinking, hungover, eating junk food, getting himself off to porn or taking himself to sex workers. Luckily, for him, he has the Money to do all this and keep an attractive woman, Selina, as a kind of paid sexual help. Selina, it transpires, is as pitiful as John, using her sexual attractiveness to her financial benefit: at least that is how it appears from John’s perspective and the book is written from his point of view.

John is also violent, prone to raping girls who won’t comply as well as fighting other men. He directs sleazy TV commercials that mainly feature young women in tight shorts and is about to direct his first movie in New York so flies between his home city, London, and the Big Apple.

Why would someone famed for the crassness of his advertising work get to make a movie? Money. His commercials make money; girls in tight pants sell any product.

Amis never lets the reader get comfortable with John or his story. If there is a way to make any given situation dirtier, more brutal or less appealing Amis dips John Self right in it, soaking him in the shitiness of his existence.

If all this sounds brutal, it is also very funny. The humour is as dark as the middle of the of a moonless night, or the inside of a blacked out sex dungeon. The tone is set very early on;

“You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them some time…”

In this darkness, however, it is Amis’ prose that gets us through. After a particularly messed up night, John Self wakes up under a hedge;

“…or bush or some blighted shrub in a soaked allotment full of nettles, crushed cigarette packs, used condoms and empty beer cans. It was quite an appropriate place for me to be born again.”

The almost biblical description of a “blighted bush” brought down to earth by the detritus that Self sees around himself before he launches into being born again.

His description of returning home from a sunshine holiday is one for the ages:

“We were all heading back from the sun, heading back to the moon, in great shape really despite the beerguts and cellulite quilting…Fleet Street tabloids were on sale at the layered kiosk…There is lots of drink and brimming holiday money. Reacquainted with their bodies, warmed, oiled, attended to, they all have the sex tan: it is called rude health…”

And his description of boarding the plane stands up to low cost flight today:

“…we clicked through the mad heat to the noise machine, tensed on its hunkers in a squealing nightmare of toilet strain. With transistors, duty-frees, big tits, white trousers, we climbed up into its trapdoor rump.”

As the story develops, we start to feel some sympathy for John Self. He has had a terrible life and now he is doing something to better himself - economically at least. There is a moment that redemption is offered. But Money takes it away, Money fucks up Self’s life completely.

Amis did not write an anti-capitalist tract nor is this a lad’s read despite its variety of sex, (paid for, non-consensual, solo), drugs and drink. The deeper point is that money is an entity with its own power. It makes us behave in a particular way depending on whether we have it, don’t have it, want it, want more of it or have lost it.

All of Self’s problems go back to money; his relationships with family, friends and lovers are all influenced by money, his professional life is the same and the problems he creates are down to how he uses and is used by Money.

The end of the book is sobering for John Self and the reader and has Amis asking if giving someone money really is the best way we can help.

Money is a rough ride and read. However, Amis’ wonderful writing makes us want to read on and his philosophical underpinning leaves us thinking about the book long after we have closed its cover.

Check out other book reviews on The Creative Stack including:

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

Clown Town by Mick Heron

Autumn by Ali Smith

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

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Violence takes many forms and sources. In this book we meet Maurice, a writer, whose violence towards others is cerebral, emotional and physical. A Ladder to the Sky is also darkly hilarious. To support my writing please consider a subscription.

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Could a psychopath be a successful novelist? We might think that lack of empathy or a being disposed to disposing of people would curtail literary ambitions. Opinions are divided because it is known that psychopaths can be intense observers of people, that they can also have the skills to convince and, many times, they seek some kind of status. Which all sound like great qualities for a novelist.

Maurice, the principal character in John Boyne’s disturbing A Ladder to the Sky is determined to be a writer: he can craft sentences, characters, phrases and descriptions but cannot create a story. Luckily for his career he recognises this weakness from a very young age. His solution is wicked, unscrupulous and essentially psychopathic.

We are introduced to Maurice’s world view through the eyes of Erich Ackerman, a writer who has received great recognition later in life. Ackerman also happens to be gay, part-Jewish and had ties with the Nazis.

Maurice writes a book based on Ackerman’s story and reveals the older man’s Nazi past to the world. The book is a triumph but Ackerman is destroyed in every sense.

Because Boyne has already presented Ackerman as a nice guy, the reader is presented with a moral quandary; do we accept that it was a long time ago or condemn the man because his actions had terrible consequences?

Thus, a little unbalanced and open to questioning the reader is led forensically through the life of Maurice; his cleverness, brazenness and intellect never put to use for anyone but himself. Should we feel sorry for the fawning older men who wanted a pretty young boy around? Surely, in another world we would describe that behaviour as predatory or even grooming.

There is a hugely funny section set in Southern Italy with Gore Vidal that gives us a moment to smile. Vidal is immune to Maurice’s charms; is he too cynical, realistic successful?

Any lingering doubts about Maurice are removed halfway through the book. He has married Edith who has been successful with her first book, and is working on her second while Maurice’s follow up novel was a flop and he is stuck.

This section, for me was the real crux and fulcrum of the story. Edith narrates this part speaking to Maurice;

“I wished that you would simply accept that things hadn’t turned out as you’d hoped and work to improve them…(you said) That you’d only ever had one good idea and even that had not been yours…And yet when I read the books that followed, I could see why they had been met with failure or rejection, for they were utterly devoid of authenticity. And - the worst crime of all - they were boring.”

Edith has seen Maurice in the way the reader has. We hope that she will extricate herself and Boyne even offers the glimmer of an escape route. However, it snaps darkly shut. Very darkly and all of our worst fears are confirmed, magnified and shoved in our faces; if this were an episode of Doctor Who, we would be hiding behind the sofa until the Maurice Dalek left the scene.

As A Ladder to the Sky tumbles into hell we are relieved of the idea that this is a book about writers. Rather it is a tale of a twisted, violent narcissist who happens to inhabit the literary world. Maurice could just as easily have been Hannibal Lecter selecting his victims in order to consume specific body parts; in this case Maurice wants them for their stories.

Maurice spends time in New York where he eventually sells his literary magazine and returns to London for a life of alcoholism. Like every narcissist, he excuses and defines his erratic behaviour; he’s not the afternoon drunk although he might not be as pretty as he once was.

Boyne’s last section is subtle turning of the tables. Maurice the old soak is flattered to be approached by a fresh young English student who wants to write his PHD thesis on the writer. He hints at publishing connections, which answers Maurice’s question of “what’s in it for me?”

The conversations between the two men in various Central London pubs are developed over 100 pages of gradual tension raising. Alfred Hitchcock described the difference between drama and suspense saying that if a bomb explodes under a table, the audience gets 15 seconds of drama. If the audience knows that there is a bomb under the table they endure 15 minutes of suspense waiting for it to go off, making a trivial conversation between characters intense.

For 100 pages, we know that there is a bomb under the various tables where these conversations take place. At first we are not sure under whose chair it is set. We see flash shots of a countdown clock, we hear the ticking and still Boyne makes us wait.

Will it explode, revealing every wicked, sordid detail of Maurice’s life? Will the young man play the player, outsmart the villain and win us the victory we want?

Or is John Boyne is cleverer than that?

Perhaps the more uncomfortable possibility is that A Ladder to the Sky is not interested in justice in those terms. That it is less a morality tale than a provocation: a novel that asks whether we, as readers, are complicit in rewarding precisely the qualities we claim to despise. Maurice’s greatest talent may not be manipulation or cruelty, but his instinctive understanding of what the literary world values—and what it is willing to forgive, so long as the sentences are polished and the story sells. If so, the most unsettling thought the novel leaves us with is not whether a psychopath can be a successful novelist, but whether success itself is sometimes evidence of the crime.

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne is published in paperback by Penguin Random House

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