gillian flynn

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Not a nice girl on the train, but a really good thriller

There’s not really much to like about Rachel, the girl on the train in Paula Hawkins’s new 9780857522320-1-edition.default.original-1thriller. Her life’s a mess. No job. A broken marriage. No real home. And way too much booze. Unable to admit to herself or her friends that she has been fired, she maintains her daily train commute staring out of the window with a supply of tinned gin and tonic for company.

As the train passes the back of her former home, where ex-husband Tom and new wife Anna now live, she fixates on the beautiful young couple she sees daily in the garden of a neighbouring house. They have the perfect life that should have been hers. When she reads in the newspaper that the woman has

Long list for Woman’s Prize for Fiction

Irrespective of whether you think there needs to be a separate prize just for books written by women, the 2013 list includes an impressive array of talent. It’s also a great example of the old reader’s saying “so many books, so little time.”

As would be expected, writers like Barbara Kinsolver, Michele Roberts, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, AM Holmes and Zadie Smith all make it. But there are also some intriguing less well-known writers,

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

It has been a long time since I read a book in which there is such a splendid array of thoroughly unsympathetic characters. It is hard to find one with whom you would share a coffee and a chat.  Yet Gillian Flynn’s latest book Gone Girl, is a compulsive read. Part psychological thriller, part who-dunnit, it is a racy mix of mystery and knowledge of the terrible event you just know is going to happenbut can’t be avoided.

Amy and Nick are a fairly typical young couple both slightly surprised they have found each other but happy in their idyllic New York brownstone. It is present from her parents paid for with the proceeds of a wildly successful children’s book Amazing Amy, where the protagonist Amy is always right.

Then Nick loses his job and Amy’s parents, once doting benefactors stumble into financial woe and the house is sold. Suddenly Nick and Amy are back on his home turf in a rented house that “screams nouveau riche” in small-town Missouri right alongside the Mississippi. Borrowing from the last of Amy’s savings, Nick opens a slightly seedy bar with his sister Go (perhaps the only really likeable person in the book). They muddle along. Then one day Amy disappears.

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