48%
27.09.26What I said about King's Writers and Lovers? That. Exactly that. Same story, same protagonist, same unrelenting pretentiousness and sense of inconsequence, with everybody hiding behind literature to avoid actual emotions. (They did that in the Pym I've just read too. It's not a trope to get the reader onside.)
This is the second book from the 2026 Women's Prize shortlist that I've read and the second book I thought was a bit rubbish. Does that say more about me or the judges?
11.08.26
Self-indulgent and confusing 'mystery' which seemed to hate everything about writers, editors and publishing - rather an ungrateful move for the two successful co-authors whose poorly written novel was going to sell well no matter how bad it was.
14.07.26
I liked this book more than the Trinidad Tourist Office probably does, and more than I should when the author had to justify some of her narrative choices in an endnote. It did a good job of juxtaposing Trinidad's violence and poverty with its aspiration and luxury, and managed to stay engaging despite having so few sympathetic characters.
29.03.26
I'm sure the author thought she was writing deep 'n' meaningful lit fic but really it was a plotless story of a weak, self-involved woman who inexplicably attracted two men before her life accidentally came together without much input from her. Writers on writers on writers is never going to be particularly insightful.
21.11.24
First of all, the murdered person does not solve their own murder (because she's, yer know, dead). Other examples of the many annoying things about this book are the endless punctuation errors, the wimpy, undeserving 'heroine', a plot and structure that made no sense, and the tiny village with its own two ambulances (complete with assigned paramedics), police station (complete with assigned detective who can't even find the cannabis farm), solicitors' practice, walk-in doctors' surgery, iPhone store and Oxfam shop.
29.10.24
No realistic people were harmed in the making of this novel.
58%
21.10.24
Fair play to Stevenson for tackling that difficult 'second in the series' with so much meta energy. His decision to continue with the trademark self-referential elements livened up the old 'murder on a train' cliche, but the characters and plot were still too confusing and I don't think I'll remember much about it.
14.08.23
There's a thin line between cleverly self-referential and plain irritating, but I think this mostly balanced on it successfully. It's an entertaining murder mystery that plays by the rules - all sorts of rules - and is a lesson in writing (and editing) itself too. The actual story was more confusing than exciting but the hook - a family of killers! - held it together, even though (spoiler!) that turned out to be somewhat misleading.
26.01.23
You don't have to like a book's characters - and these were universally unlikeable (a known problem with this author) - but you do have to be interested in what will happen to them - and I wasn't. The people and their stories just didn't hang together, to the extent that I wondered how much the author cared.
06.06.22
Weird, maybe, convoluted, definitely, but impossible? Well, given I couldn't understand what the protagonists saw in each other, or why they did what they did, or why it resolved so awkwardly, then yes.
Also: 'pointless pandemic-themed epilogue' warning. Why did the publisher evidently insist on this 'realistic' afterthought when the whole point of the story is that it's 'impossible'?
Billed as a thriller but more of a character study. I was expecting something interesting to happen - a murder, a plot twist - but no, it was just an ultimately rather inconsequential story, which is interestingly how I described the previous Moriarty I read.
46%
02.12.21
I hadn't realised that the clever and incisive humorous poet Brian Bilston is not technically a real person. Whoever he is, he needs to stick to writing clever and incisive poems and forget the novel writing. This homage to Adrian Mole (an equally hapless Brian Bilston aged 45 and three quarters) wasn't particularly successful. But his poems are truly fabulous so he gets marks for those.
68%
I should have been reading something worthy but this exuberant journey into a writer's fragile psyche was much more fun. The eponymous plot wasn't all that exciting but the unlikely story of the (allegedly) stolen story unfolded and - importantly - ended pleasingly. Not high literature, despite its pretensions, but a good read.
Note: another new label: writers on writers. As good as this was, authors often fall back on what they know best: writing. When a character is a writer, you can't help thinking - enough self-reference! Get out and get some proper life experience!
48%
You'd think I'm the ideal audience for this novel - I've studied, lived and worked in Oxford and work with words now. But the story was so dull, the characters so two-dimensional, the dialogue so unlikely, and the author so keen to show off her conscientious research and ruminations on the nature of words that I just didn't care.
Note: I'm might also start keeping count of books where women become pregnant after having sex once. Spoiler: It's most books with unmarried female protagonists, especially when they're set in the past.
New label: pregnant first time
13.07.21
I can't see the appeal of this much-hyped novel. I think what irritated me most was the fact it was all so unlikely. Unrealistic I can handle - if the world building and characters are strong enough you can happily suspend your disbelief - but this was just silly because it didn't ring true on any level.
And the poetry! Dear God, the awful poetry, which even one of the characters thought was bad. So why include it? This book just didn't know what it was or where it was going.
27.03.21
This was unusual in being pretty well written and edited, with a great premise, but a narrative structure that just fell flat. It was fun but would have been far more entertaining if Finlay Donovan was actually killing something.
