Review: Almost Love by Louise O’Neill

Simon McDonald on Louise O'Neill's raw and powerful Almost Love.

Almost Love follows a young woman named Sarah who falls in love fast — and hard — for a man twenty years her senior, and starts sacrificing her career, friendships, and relationships to be with him.

We have all been there, or witnessed it: a relationship destined for failure from the very start. The writing is on the wall; sometimes we’re the friend who knows this, but can’t — for the sake of the friendship — reveal our concern — and most of us have been the protagonist, invested in a romantic relationship going nowhere, certainly not the direction we want it to, but hopeful — so damn hopeful! — that our inner fears won’t be realised, that our gut instinct is wrong. We know from the very start that Sarah’s relationship with Matthew is fated to end badly, but we know what it’s like, to be in love, to think we’ve found the person who gets us, who appreciates us; or been so blinded by our own desires, our fantasy of What Could Be, that we overlook our partner’s failings. Hope overrides reality; the belief that we can change things, set a new path. Sarah is all of us, and bearing witness to her razing of everything meaningful in her life, and the erosion of her confidence, is truly agonising. There is humour throughout, certainly; but it’s the gallows kind, that only exacerbates the splintering of our hearts as Sarah’s journey unfolds.

Wry and devastating in equal measure, Almost Love is a delectable and heartbreaking tale about an all-consuming relationship gone wrong, and demonstrates how treacherous, agonising and addictive love can be; how love can be an exercise in self-sabotage, and falling for the wrong person is often akin to hitting the self-destruct button. O’Neill navigates the jagged edges of love so astutely. I loved it.

Review: The Night Market by Jonathan Moore

Harry Bosch meets Blade Runner in this brilliant thriller reviewed by simon mcdonald

Jonathan Moore’s frightening near-future thriller The Night Market is a thought-provoking noirish crime novel set in a gorgeously realised subtly-futuristic, overwhelmingly dystopian version of San Francisco, where copper thieves run rampant, drones buzz above the heads of the city’s citizens, and ostentatious consumer consumption runs riot. Think of a Michael Connelly Harry Bosch novel set in a Blade Runner-esque world.

When a man is found dead — his corpse in a terrifying state of decay  — in one of the city’s luxury homes, SFPD Homicide detective Ross Carver and his partner are called to the scene to lead the investigation. But before they’re able to get beyond a cursory glance at the victim, six FBI agents — or are they? —burst in and forcibly remove them from the premises. The detectives are hastened into a disinfectant chamber, sprayed with a metallic-tasting liquid, then rendered unconscious. When Carver wakes two days later in his apartment, he has no memory of the events that occurred; but his mysterious neighbour, Mia, is strangely determined to help Carver remember.

The Night Market steadily ramps up its revelations, and it gradually becomes clear there are larger forces at play. Moore resists the temptation to have Carver follow breadcrumbs into the darkest corners of his incredibly-imagined world, keeping the narrative tight and focused. Moore’s latest novel — the first of his I’ve read, but surely not the last — is a tense, gritty thriller, and near-perfect in its overall execution, with an ending that lingers well past the final page. Seriously, this is a book that nails its finale; it’s pitch-perfect and haunting. It’s one of my favourite thrillers of the year so far.

Our Top 10 Bestsellers of the Week

1. The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
2. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
3. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
4. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos by Jordan Peterson
5. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
6. The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan
7. This Is What Happened by Mick Herron
8. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
9. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
10. Silent Invasion: China's Influence in Australia by Clive Hamilton

A.J. Finn's compulsive domestic noir thriller The Woman in the Window reigned supreme last week, while staff favourites Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, The Immortalists and Pachinko maintained their place in the top 5. 

Our Top 10 Bestsellers of February 2018

1. The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
2. The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
3. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
4. The Only Story by Julian Barnes
5. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
6. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
7. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
8. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
9. Winter by Ali Smith
10. This is What Happened by Mick Herron

Our staff favourite The Immortalists tops our bestseller list this month, which is the kind of brilliant novel that swallows you whole and forces you to live in its world even when you’re not turning its pages. A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window — a Hitchcockian brand of domestic noir whose pacing will force you  to reexamine our casual use of the word compulsive — is our highest-ranking crime novel. Meanwhile, Michael Wolff's controversial look inside the Trump White House remains lodged in the Top 10.  

Review: The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan

Simon McDonald reviews Dervla McTiernan's debut crime novel The Ruin.

In Dervla McTiernan’s debut The Ruin, an elaborate plot and vivid setting serves as mere backdrop for showcasing her greater talent: creating unforgettable, emotionally textured characters, DI Cormac Reilly chief among them, and putting them through the emotional wringer. When you think of The Ruin, think fast, furiously-paced crime solving laced with social implications that are as frightening as any chase or shootout ever put to paper. McTiernan has set the pace for every other crime writer this year.

The book opens twenty years in the past when, on his first week on the job, young Garda Cormac Reilly is called to a dilapidated country house. There he finds two neglected children, fifteen-year-old Maude and five-year-old Jack. Upstairs, their mother Hilaria lies dead as a result of a heroin overdose. Jack is pushed into foster care, Maude disappears, and Reilly moves on; up the career ladder and eventually away from Galway to Dublin.

Presently Reilly is back in the town he thought he’d forgotten, assigned to working cold cases  at a new police station which is populated by some suspicious characters, who are more than willing to make their resentment of him known. When Jack is discovered dead as the result of a suicide at the same time Maude returns from decades away, Reilly is encouraged to delve back into the case that’s haunted him in the intervening years, tasked with finding a link between Hilaria’s death and her son’s.

This is a story of human frailties, violence and betrayal; of accepting the consequences of choices made, and managing their ripples in the future. McTiernan’s debut is assured, elegantly crafted and utterly compelling. DI Cormac Reilly’s second case can’t come soon enough.

Review: The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

Our 'King of Crime' Simon McDonald reviews A.J. Finn's New York Times bestseller The Woman in the Window.

With The Woman in the Window, A.J. Finn has concocted a Hitchcockian brand of domestic noir whose pacing forces us to reexamine our casual use of the word compulsive. Finn has put the rest of the thriller-writing world on notice: he’s going to be around for a while.

It has been ten months since the title character, Anna Fox, last left her home. She lives alone in an expensive family home in uptown Manhattan, whiling away the hours by gazing through her window, spying on her neighbours, watching old black-and-white movies, playing chess, and chatting on an online forum. A glass of merlot is usually never too far from her hand as she goes about these pursuits. In fact, drinking wine should really be considered an activity of its own; so, too, her casual pill-popping of her many prescribed drugs.

Anna is not a recluse by choice. She is agoraphobic — a ruthless anxiety disorder — as a result of a traumatic event in her not-too-distant past. As a child psychologist, she recognises her symptoms, knows how debilitating they are; but she is powerless to overcome her own personal psychosis. Her heavy consumption of alcohol inoculates Anna from dealing with her reality; separated from her husband and daughter, a ghost anchored in the land of the living.

Her sedate daily routine is interrupted when the Russell family move in next door: Paul and Jane, and their son Ethan. Anna forms an immediate and unlikely comradeship with the teenage boy, who seems like he needs a friend as he exposes his father’s violent tendencies. Jane, who also visits, is more obscure in her observations of Paul, but Anna still gets the sense this is a family on tenterhooks. Her worst fears are confirmed when, through her binoculars, she witnesses what she perceives to be an act of violence. The police’s investigation is perfunctory at best, Anna the very definition of an unreliable witness; so she continues to gaze upon the Russell house, desperate to prove what she saw while imprisoned in her own home.

The Woman in the Window literally interrupted my professional and personal life. Once in, I simply had to stay in, and stick with it to the end. Finn’s debut is a supercharged domestic noir in the tradition of Paula Hawkin’s The Girl on the Train, Renee Knight’s Disclaimer and, of course, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. The elegant prose and its blistering pace keep the heart of the novel beating even when some revelations prove predictable. The book never strays too far from convention, but its pedal-to-the-floor narrative drive propels it above and beyond its kin. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.

Our Top 10 Bestsellers of January 2018

Michael Wolff's explosive examination of the Trump White House continued to dominate our bestseller list in January, while Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach was the favoured beach read over the summer break.  

1. Fire & Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
2. Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
3. Sydney in Photos by Tim Denoodle
4. A New England Affair by Steven Carroll
5. The Accident on the A35 by Graeme Macrae Burnet
6. The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 by Tina Brown
7. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
8. Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman
9. Tin Man by Sarah Winman
10. The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

Mick Herron Returns with Two New Books!

Mick Herron has published two books this month; a standalone thriller titled This Is What Happened and the fifth entry in the Jackson Lamb series, London Rules. Our bookseller Simon McDonald reviews both.

This Is What Happened by Mick Herron

When discussing his film Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock explained to Francois Truffaut that he “was directing the viewers… I was playing them, like an organ.” Which is precisely what Mick Herron does in This Is What Happened, shrewdly manipulating the reader, keeping them in suspense right up until the nail-biting finish. What seems at the start to be another in Herron’s long line of successful spy novels seamlessly transforms into an ingenious and intense psychological thriller that what will surely stand as one of the finest thrillers of 2018.

Twenty-six-year-old mail room employee Maggie Barnes is hiding in the lavatories of a 27-story London office building in the middle of the night. She has been recruited by MI5 agent Harvey Wells to upload spyware on the company’s computer network from a USB drive. She is untrained, totally inexperienced, and a nervous wreck; but she is empowered by her mission for Queen and Country, feels good to be doing something meaningful, having found herself isolated in the bustling metropolis of England’s capital. But her mission goes sideways, fast, just as readers would expect, and we are trained, based on years of reading the genre, to assume that her escape from the clutches of this “evil corporation” will be the book’s focus. Which is precisely when Herron pulls the rug out from readers’ feet.

This Is What Happened is not an espionage novel. It is a pared-down, sumptuous, enthralling, propulsive masterclass of suspense with a hard-boiled heart. It’s Hitchcockian, dark and menacing, and intricately-plotted. The kind of book you’ll blow through in a single night.

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London Rules by Mick Herron

London Rules — the fifth book in the Jackson Lamb series — epitomises precisely why Mick Herron’s espionage novels are the new hallmarks of the genre. It is a rousing, provocative — and genuinely funny, at times — political thriller with a  labyrinthine plot that, despite its villains remaining little more than sketches, excels thanks to its large, diverse cast of ‘Slow Horses’ whose personal travails and tribulations add depth to protagonists who are often little more than stock cardboard cutouts.

New readers are welcomed into the world of Slough House, where failed (dubbed incompetent) MI-5 agents are deposited to waste their days, twiddling their thumbs, doing mind-numbing busy work, but it’s readers who’ve been with these characters since Slow Horses who’ll get maximum enjoyment from London Rules. By now, the Slow Horses are entangled in a thick continuity soup, and each book in the series serves as an episodic interlude into their lives, the spotlight shared between various characters. This time around the balance is fairly even, which makes the story’s unravelling all the more nerve-wracking, because Herron has displayed a willingness to kill off characters before, and given the vastness of the cast he’s working with, one can’t help but feel it’s only a matter of time before further reductions are made.

London Rules deals with various plot threads that eventually, quite brilliantly, tie together. While Slow Horse Roddy Ho is targeted for assassination, a string of bizarre, seemingly random terrorist attacks rock the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Regent’s Park’s First Desk, Claude Whelan, is struggling to protect the hapless prime minister from the MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote, who has his sights set on Number Ten; not to mention the MP’s wife, a tabloid columnist, who’s obliterating Whelan in print; then there’s the soon-to-be mayor of London the Prime Minister has allied himsel with, who has a dark, potentially devastating secret. Poor Whelan, dealing with all of this, while his own deputy, Lady Di Taverner, watches on, waiting for him to stumble. And while these machinations are certainly intriguing and propulsive, it’s how River Cartwright, Catherine Standish, JK Coe and all the others are managing the stresses of their personal lives, and the consequences of their previous missions, that prove the ultimate page-turning factor.

Mick Herron’s novels sit comfortably somewhere between le Carré and Bond: meticulously plotted, deliberately paced, fun, and not overly deep. London Rules is a terrific yarn filled with tension and surprises right to the end. Every instalment in this series is a pleasure to read.

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