This week's bookcase includes reviews of Tin Man by Sarah Winman, Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell and Reading With Patrick: A Teacher, A Student And A Life-changing Friendship by Michelle Kuo
Tin Man
by Sarah Winman
Actress and writer Sarah Winman's third novel Tin Man is a heart-breaking story about love, loss and grief. Ellis and Michael are best friends, both growing up without their mothers in Oxford in the 1970s. The pair share a love of cycling and travel, and on a trip to France, their relationship becomes physical. A few years later, Annie enters the picture, with the trio soon becoming inseparable. But then Michael moves to London and disappears from Ellis and Annie's lives. Years pass, and in 1996 the reader encounters a withdrawn Ellis living on his own and working nights at a car factory. The devastating events of the intervening years slowly come to light as Winman skilfully moves between characters and decades. This book is all emotion, and unashamedly so, exploring themes such as the exuberance of youth and the desperation of unrequited love - and what lingers at the end is an overwhelming sense of sadness. Tin Man may be a short novel, at just 195 pages, but it packs an enormous punch.
Then She Was Gone
by Lisa Jewell
Ellie Mack, 15, disappears without a trace - a golden girl gone no one knows where. Ten years later, a body is found and her mother, Laurel, has a chance to rebuild her shattered, on-hold life. She meets a charismatic stranger in a cafe and is swept into an affair. But is Floyd all he seems - and why is his daughter, Poppy, almost a carbon copy of Ellie? Jewell builds a gripping novel around a maze of dark secrets, a tautly wound psychological thriller in which the suspense builds slowly. Her storytelling is immaculate, hopping between past and present, and in and out of different characters. It's a tough read at times, but Jewell always keeps everything moving. The intrigue never flags as she pushes towards a redemptive resolution. An astute and emotionally charged read, riddled with creepiness. Fully recommended.
Friend Request
by Laura Marshall
This psychological thriller grips you right from the tag-line - "Maria Weston wants to be friends on Facebook. But Maria has been dead for 25 years. Hasn't she?" Flipping between the present and high school days in 1989, it tells the story of Louise, a middle-aged, single mum, who is stopped in her tracks when she receives a Facebook friend request from an old school friend who disappeared 25 years ago and is presumed dead. All the adolescent pain of her school days and the dark secrets surrounding Maria's death come flooding back to haunt Louise, who has struggled to move on from the events of 1989 and, more recently, a painful divorce. It is an accomplished debut novel from author Laura Marshall, which not only boasts an engrossing storyline, but also perfectly captures teenage angst and the need to be accepted. But even more relevant is the book's insight into social media, its dangers and how much we all leave ourselves open online. It by no means reads like a first novel and Marshall shows real promise to become a firm thriller favourite.
Reading With Patrick: A Teacher, A Student And A Life-changing Friendship
by Michelle Kuo
Michelle Kuo's impassioned account of life in the Deep South is at once urgent, and mournful of the past. Kuo arrived in rural Arkansas in 2004 as an idealistic young teacher, and struggled to adjust to the vicissitudes of life in the Delta: a place where corporal punishment and racial segregation remained prominent features of an area long-since used to violence and discrimination. Among her students is Patrick Browning, a softly-spoken 15-year-old whose upbringing with a crippled ex-con father and diabetic mother is as typical as any of his peers', but set apart if only due to his quiet studiousness. It is him, who, years later, Kuo returns to teach again from the confines of his prison; adding structure to his structureless days behind bars for manslaughter, where he is rendered unable to take care of his baby daughter. Kuo's triumph is to place Patrick's story within the larger story of the American south: To insist that learning can transcend space and time, if not actually solve the myriad injustices that still tip the scales against so many of the area's black inhabitants. Reading With Patrick is a moving and important work at a time when America remains gripped by inner turmoil.
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