Annie Ward mixes together a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and alcohol with all the suspicion, gossip and lies circulating among the pushy soccer moms, its charismatic sports coach, and staff at an elite private school in the Colorado mountains to great effect in The Lying Club. At an elite private school nestled in the Colorado mountains, a tangled web…
Someone might be getting away with murder in Romy Hausmann’s novel, Sleepless, an ambitious cat-and-mouse thriller, about guilt, coercive control, social inequality, retribution and justice. It’s over, my angel. Today I’m going to die. Just like her. He’s won.It’s been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she’s wanted nothing more than…
Nydia Hetherington’s A Girl Made of Air twirled across my Twitter timeline with its stunning cover earlier this summer and, as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to read it. This is the story of The Greatest Funambulist Who Ever Lived… Born into a post-war circus family, our nameless star was unwanted and forgotten, abandoned in the…
Book Review: Dear Child by Romy Hausmann, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
Book reviews, German booksRomy Hausmann’s Dear Child begins where other thrillers often end and takes the breaking news event we might hear about—a young woman escaping from captivity with children in tow—as her starting point, before showing us what life was like for them and how they fare once free. A windowless shack in the woods. Lena’s life and that of her two…
When Pete and Maddie discover that the child they brought home from hospital two years ago is not the same one as Maddie gave birth to, an already fraught situation rapidly blows up into something altogether more dangerous and frightening in JP Delaney’s latest novel Playing Nice. Pete Riley answers the door one morning to a parent’s worst nightmare. On…
JP Delaney’s novel The Perfect Wife is an unnerving, skewed story of grief, our obsession with perfection and that with work, AI and our digital footprints, relationship double standards, and conflicting child-rearing approaches. Abbie wakes in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. The man by her side explains that he’s her husband. He’s a titan…
Kim Sherwood’s Testament won the 2016 Bath Novel Award and is one of the four books shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award which is announced on Thursday. Of everyone in her complicated family, Eva was closest to her grandfather: a charismatic painter – and a keeper of secrets. So when…
JP Delaney’s novel The Perfect Wife is an unnerving, skewed story of grief, our obsession with perfection and that with work, AI and our digital footprints, relationship double standards, and conflicting child-rearing approaches. Abbie wakes in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. The man by her side explains that he’s her husband. He’s a titan…
I had a hankering to read Sonia Velton’s debut novel Blackberry & Wild Rose for its stunning cover alone before I knew anything more about the story. But what a world I found wrapped up in that oh so very beautiful dust jacket. WHEN ESTHER THOREL, the wife of a Huguenot silk-weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel she thinks…
If you’re looking for a book that’ll take you on an absolute trip and mess with your head, then this is it. Believe Me is the latest psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Girl Before which I reviewed here. Here’s what Believe Me is about: Claire Wright likes to play other people. A British drama student, in New York…