@EineReiseDurchDieZeit - not entirely sure. I didn't really need or want the perspective shift (Andy's story would have been enough for me and it felt like a change of tack too late in the narrative to really make sense) but having been Jen in the not too distant past, I felt very seen (as the kids would say). Nothing worse than realising you're single and yet in a relationship, I would say. I really enjoy Alderton's observational style and I did find myself rooting hard for Andy but I reckon if you're going to tell both sides of the story, you probably do need to commit to telling both sides.
14 Hunted by Abir Mukherjee
Complete mystery as to why this very average thriller got a whole table of its own in Waterstones and such high praise spread all over the cover. It was deeply average and involved a lot of tedious driving around the States in the dark, without the tension ever really getting going despite being told repeatedly how tense the situation was.
13 James by Percival Everett
Late to this, because I loved Huckleberry Finn as a child and having re-read it later in life felt uncomfortable about how uncritically I accepted the portrayal of Jim when I first read it. This deserves all the praise it has had and has made me want to go back to Huckleberry Finn and read it differently.
12 The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli
An unnamed narrator is invited to a house just outside Moscow by a man who was beside Putin as he rose to power and shaped Russia as it is today. Baranov – a fictional character but surely based on a real person – tells the story of how Russia shook off its Soviet past and how Russians embraced Putin as their leader, and how he cultivated a sense that the rest of the world was against them and where that led to. There are many real people who feature here whose stories are readily available for fact checking and my memory of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is fresh enough that the details are entirely plausible. This was excellent, even if the blurb suggests it to be something other than it is. It isn’t really a thriller in the usual sense of the word, and it’s more horrifying than thrilling. I’d like to know what someone who understands Russia much better than I do makes of it.
11 The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada
Recommended to me on TikTok by a reviewer who said “if you like Severance, you’ll enjoy this”. I do like Severance and I did enjoy this but I don’t think the two are related. There’s a clear “dystopian workplace” thread and the weirdness of the Factory is as creepy as Lumon Industries so there are certainly similarities but this was a spare, slightly dreamy novel where characters accept their fate and move in overlapping orbits while remaining very much unsevered. I’m still trying to work out exactly what I think of it.
10 The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller
Neffy enters a medical facility as a trial participant. She will receive a vaccine for a novel virus sweeping the world. She’s unhappy with the life she’s left behind and aware her boyfriend and mother don’t support her choice. Days later, she wakes up after an acute illness – the virus has mutated, the world has emptied out and she is isolated in the unit with four surviving trial participants. Only Neffy had the vaccine – and the virus – so only she is immune.
There was a lot about this that was imperfect – the four other trial participants aren’t fully realised characters and feel much less substantial than Neffy. The two plot devices by which we learn about Neffy’s past are contrived and stretch credulity and I was less interested in her past than her present predicament. And then the slowness of the days in the unit speed ahead suddenly to an ending that doesn’t really do justice to what came before. But I can see this was written during (and possibly slightly prior to) Covid and perhaps that had an impact both on how the book was finished and how I approached it.
9 Lowborn by Kerry Hudson
Memoir of Hudson’s chaotic childhood spent in poverty and her account of revisiting the places she grew up to try to make sense of her childhood. It feels inappropriate to criticise this, not least because I have been fortunate enough to be insulated from the experience she writes about, and I have no bad words to say about the book itself – it was well written, I found parts of it very moving and she is compassionate and curious about her past and able to treat the people who treated her badly with understanding and empathy. And perhaps it was never intended to try to unpack the systemic challenges that keep people trapped in poverty or why we live in a society that is so unequal, but I got the distinct impression that that was what she intended or at least that that was what her publisher wanted the book to be. And yet the horror of her childhood was as much about poor choices by the adults around her as it was about poverty, and as such the book can’t pretend to be an examination of how we have ended up here.
8 Matrescence by Lucy Jones
Thank you to whoever recommended this on here. There was a lot to think about, even 16 years after the birth of my youngest. I read a lot of books about being a mother when the children were young, trying to make sense of what I was feeling and what was happening, but they were either full of misery and angst (looking at you, Rachel Cusk) or unhelpfully joyful. This – I think – would have helped me a lot at the time, and also I hope will make me a better friend to those younger friends of mine currently in the throes of early motherhood.