to anyone struggling with anxiety. Hope you are feeling better soon.
2. The Power by Naomi Alderman
Lots of reviews of this on the 2017 thread and elsewhere so I won't say too much about it. As a reading experience, I was disappointed - I read Disobedience by the same author last year and really enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to this one, but it is very serious, intense and rather grim, so not an easy read. However, the premise was actually a lot more clever than I thought, and it's one of those books that stays with you. I've been thinking about it a lot, especially in relation to current affairs.
3. Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
This was named in lots of the Best of 2017 book lists. It's a spiky, zeitgeisty little book about two students living in Dublin, who are taken up by a successful older couple. Relationships develop between the four characters, in particular between Frances, the protagonist, and Nick, the husband of the other couple, who embark on an affair. The title links to a joke that the two younger women have at one point in the book about language: "What is conversation? What is a friend" (I'm paraphrasing from memory), and this is much of what the book is about - relationships and language.
Frances is a vivid character; she's very bright, and witty, and her conversation with the others sparkles and crackles with clever things to say. But at the same time, she's (kind of annoyingly) raw and vulnerable - she idolises others, doesn't like herself much, self-sabotages, self-harms (it's interesting how inanimate objects seem to harm her as well - too hot water, the staple on a sheaf of papers). She and Nick speak to one another so ironically that it seems that neither they, nor we, know how they are feeling about one another - both, it seems, are pretending to be hard when actually they're much softer than they realise.
Both of these would make cracking book group reads with lots to talk about!