The Cut - Chris Brookmyre

 

54%

14.06.22

I had breakfast with Chris Brookmyre once, at an editing conference. We had a very interesting conversation and then he went on to give the sweariest keynote speech ever, which, probably to his surprise, the editors loved. This book is neither as interesting nor as sweary, unfortunately - competent enough but with some unlikely coincidences and confusing plot points.

And points are lost, as ever, for the pandemic epilogue. Come on, authors/publishers! We've just had 400 pages of suspending our disbelief so you really don't need to shoehorn in some awkward references to lockdown at the end.

Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart

 

51%

08.04.21

I would never have chosen to read something so unrelentingly bleak but, hey, this won the Booker Prize, and was the first choice of my new reading group so sometimes the challenge is worthwhile. Not in this case. It was heavy in every sense: weighed down by endless, meaningless adjectives, metaphors and similes, by the interchangeable sex-and-power-hungry men, by the interchangeable weak-and-untrustworthy women, by its lack of nuance, by layer upon layer upon tedious layer of Bad Things Happening. A grim semi-autobiographical novel isn't automatically a good novel.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman

68%
14.04.18

This is the Current Big Thing so, of course, I really wanted to hate it and, indeed, the narrator is incredibly irritating at first. But she mellows (or, more likely, the author forgets to make her quite as annoying) and I enjoyed the redemptive story despite myself. I also liked Glaswegian setting, a surprisingly rare location for bestselling novels.

Gillespie and I - Jane Harris

64%
05.10.14

I like an unreliable narrator (see here and here), and this one is so unreliable that you're never sure whether she's unreliable at all. Thrillingly sinister and very clever, but not quite as satisfying as Harris's first novel, The Observations.