to Tea, Sadik and anyone else having a tough time at the moment.
Sadik, I think the best of the "journalist does minimum wage jobs and writes about it" genre is *Nickeled and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich - have you read it? It's American, so the issues she explores are not always relevant to the UK, but she goes about her project with a particular gusto which I admired while I was reading.
Also just wanted to say I liked All Among the Barley although Hardy it ain't.
67. The Wych Elm, Tana French
I'm in the middle of a few weeks transitioning from one very hectic job to another, and needed something absorbing but undemanding. This was absolutely perfect.
Toby, the narrator, is a favoured young man: good-looking, charming and the product of a doting middle-class family and an expensive education. He's the sort of person who navigates through life easily, unware of his privilege or of how much harder life might be without it. He thinks of himself as "lucky" - until one night when a traumatic incident leaves him shattered both physically and mentally, with a head injury and PTSD.
Toby is a supremely unreliable narrator - he is unreliable, even to himself, as his memory and grip on reality let him down after his head injury. He's also unreliable because he hasn't, until now, had to care much about other people's lives or problems. "Droning on", "being a drama queen" - he filters out what he doesn't want to hear, or doesn't care much about.
The story, set in present day Dublin, involves the uncovering of a murder linked to Toby's teenage years. There is relatively little action in the book but genuinely clever psychological suspense as French twists the perspective - is Toby witness, victim, suspect, murderer? Does he even know himself? Ends up taking you to some quite unexpected places; a book less about whodunnit but why, and what now. I've never read a Tana French before but will seek out more of hers on the basis of this.