Book Reviews (April 2025)
Crime & romance & more.
Gill Perdue - The Night I Killed Him
Best pals (of the sort that would never actually call themselves ‘besties’) and detectives specialising in sensitive interviews Laura Shaw and Niamh Dermody are back, this time with an old interview to revisit. Gemma was a scared sixteen-year-old when first questioned about her brother’s disappearance at sea the night of his twenty-first birthday, presumed to be a suicide. Now she’s a glamorous influencer with a gang of loyal followers - Gemstones - and a seemingly-perfect family.
Because this is, you know, a crime novel, all is not quite what it seems beneath the surface. As soon as we’re inside Gemma’s head, we know something’s up, and it’s of course a more heightened dramatic gap between Instagram-perfection and messy-reality than most, but a relatable one all the same. Dublin writer Perdue is good on what it might mean to be influencer-famous in an Irish context, with its mix of begrudgery and pride; one thing I really liked is that she doesn’t use the online-stalker-trope in ways that she so easily could. The Gemstones are sometimes a tad more concerned with their special offers than their idol’s emotional well-being, but they’re not the villains here. It’s a nice handling of the weirdness of parasocial relationships (in an Irish context, I think Sophie White also does this very well in her first couple of contemporary-fiction books).
But as much as we might be reading for the mystery - and the last few chapters had my heart in my throat, panicking over things, oh my nerves - we are also reading for the personal lives of our two detectives. Laura, who is not the best at letting go of her past, and for valid reason, has to face her estranged father’s decline, made more complicated by the arrival of a younger half-sister, who needs somewhere to stay while she visits him in the hospice. Niamh, having let go of her toxic ex, is undergoing IVF, determined to make a go of parenthood on her own, but she’s also aware it might mess up her career and her friendship with Laura (we have seen, in earlier books, the strain parenthood puts on such things).
I raced through this. Out in July.
*
Samantha Harvey - Orbital
I was primed to like this book - space! - and I did, very much. It is short, intense, lyrical; it’s been described as ‘nature writing about space’ which I think is helpful context for a book that really does not ‘do’ much plot-wise, simply (but beautifully) witnesses six different astronauts on the International Space Station over the course of 24 hours, or 16 sunrises and sunsets. There is, in almost the background, a storm, and also plans for other astronauts to go further, take the next step in this journey, but mostly it’s thoughts and musings and observations and the Earth from a distance, the pale blue dot Sagan wrote of. Really worth reading (as some fancy prizes have already decided).
*
Jean Hanff Korelitz - The Sequel
I gobbled up Korelitz’s The Plot, a delicious tale of literary frustration and plagiarism, and this is a pleasing follow-up. The first title focused on Jake, the second - inevitable spoilers here - his widow, who has taken it upon herself to write her own novel (echoes of Elle Woods’s “what, like it’s hard?” here). Anna’s book proves to be successful, but also gains the attention of some unsettling people - some of whom may know the full truth about her.
Cue the ominous music! The body count in this is impressive - it’s a bit like the later Ripley books (one of many influences on this text, which names each chapter after a famous sequel), where there’s a very cold sense of simply doing what needs to be done in order to protect oneself. I am not sure it is wise to read this with the hope of complete realism - even though all the bookish/publishing stuff is, as with the first, a mix of fun and too-on-the-nose disheartening - but it is, as they say, a great old yarn.
*
Riley Sager - Middle Of The Night
For dark, compulsive page-turners, Riley Sager is always a good bet. Sometimes they are genre-bending and a tad insane (I have enjoyed this a bit) - think along the lines of some of Sarah Pinborough’s thrillers - but this one is a more straightforward crime/thriller tale, though the possibility of supernatural activity still nips at the ankles occasionally.
Ethan is 40, now, and back in his childhood home after many years, one of six houses in the little cul-de-sac and a place still haunted by the disappearance of Ethan’s best friend 30 years ago - ripped from a tent they were sharing in the back yard and never seen again. Could this have something to do with the strange institute nearby, which Ethan and some of the other kids sneaked into just before that fateful sleepover? What does the suicide of an older boy on the lane have to do with it? Is Ethan’s old babysitter, also back in the neighbourhood with a kid of her own, involved in some way?
(Dun-dun-dun!) This is fun and twisty, and particularly appealing if you enjoy the trope of adults-haunted-by-shared-childhood-secrets.
*
Emily Henry - Funny Story
There’s a children’s librarian at the heart of this romance, so of course I was rooting for her. When we meet Daphne, things have just ended with the love of her life - Peter has run off with his long-term best friend, Petra (the name similarities are noted). The only person who might understand is Petra’s ex, Miles - even though she’s never been overly fond of him, or impressed by him (in large part because Peter wasn’t). Fake dating ensues - that this book leans heavily on familiar tropes but doesn’t feel entirely ridiculous is down to Henry’s characterisation and warmth - and eventually the two fall for each other. It’s sweet and cosy and comforting without being saccharine, although the novels are starting to blur together a little bit for me. Which didn’t stop me from devouring…
*
Emily Henry - Great Big Beautiful Life
Alice is an optimist, a dreamer, the ‘sunshine’ to the grumpy-sunshine dynamic we’re about to step into. A journalist mostly focusing on celebrity profiles, she’s a little bit of a disappointment to her family (so she imagines) for not doing something more ‘serious’; she’s also working through some grief. The opportunity to write a book about a mysterious media heiress, Margaret Ives, is important for both personal and professional reasons, but when she arrives on the island, she realises she’s not the only journalist up for the job.
Hayden is a serious writer sort, having won a fancy prize for a biography of a dementia-suffering musician in his final years, and yet - this is an Emily Henry novel - there is a spark between him and Alice from the beginning. The fact that they’re competing for the same gig doesn’t stop them from giving in to their mutual attraction, but it does create difficulties, especially when it seems as though Margaret is deliberately messing with them both. Interspersed with this is the history of Margaret’s family, and a secret lurking beneath the surface…
A very fun read, and I do like when we get books about writers or other bookish types - it’s one of the appealing things about an Emily Henry novel. She also does a great job on settings - not quite the cosy-small-town or glamorous-big-city of many romance titles but something in between. And the emotions always feel real - which makes even the slightly-improbable set-ups work. (I may need a breather after this one. But that is not unusual after six books in quick succession, in any genre.)
*
Claire Gleeson - Show Me Where It Hurts
This debut from an Irish writer (and doctor) takes a ‘ripped from the headline’ scenario - a father who murders his children (and tries to murder his wife) - and steps past the initial shock factor of it all, exploring what it means to live with a catastrophic loss, to go on after such a horrific event.
We open with Rachel and Tom in the car after visiting Tom’s parents; the two kids are asleep in the back. Tom apologises, and then swerves, deliberately. Black.
Rachel survives, as does Tom. The kids don’t. And as Rachel moves, impossibly, forwards, we also jump back - to when she first met Tom, to when the kids were born, to the fraught days before what Rachel keeps thinking of as The Accident.
Unlike the family situation portrayed in Catherine Talbot’s chilling suspense novel, A Good Father, Tom’s actions here are not presented as part of a systematic campaign of control or abuse, though the media coverage of the events sometimes suggest that, along with other inaccuracies. Rachel, a nurse, knew Tom was depressed - he’d been in hospital, there was medication - and that, for her, was the thing to worry about. How might she help her husband when he seemed unable to help himself, along with taking care of the kids and the home and trying to have some kind of life and not get too resentful of him in the process? How to be sympathetic and supportive without infantalising him?
And then, what next? Tom survives. His understanding of what he’s done seems shaky. He does not seem like the man she married, the man she loved. She should hate him - but what, she wonders, is there left to hate? There’s so little of him there, anymore.
I love how much this book resists getting soapy. There are moments that seem like they might provide a sort of quick catharsis - Rachel saves a child from drowning in a swimming pool while on holiday, or meets up with another woman who has had a similar horrific experience - but Gleeson pulls back on making it that simple or straightforward. It’s messy and complicated and very very human. So much of the book is not about how to forgive someone for a terrible thing (or if one can/should); it’s about loving someone with a mental illness, and how difficult and frustrating that can be.
There were a few things I’d have loved more details about, as Rachel moves through time - a newly-fraught relationship with a childhood friend, whose IVF struggles pay off, is one that particularly fascinated me (how do we manage existing relationships when everything we know about the world is wrong?). Her sister, who is kind of a flake and then settles down, and who never liked Tom but also won’t say a bad word about him after any of this. The neighbour across the road, who leaves food for her the first few weeks but doesn’t push her to talk about any of it. And yet, the space Rachel has for all of this is limited - she is not a Hallmark-card inspirational-woman finding-a-reason-for-even-the-terrible-things, she is a human moving through the world after a horrendous thing.
I wouldn’t quite say I ‘enjoyed’ this, but I did find it thought-provoking and moving, as well as elegantly written. Worth checking out.
Elsewhere:
reviewed for the Irish Times in March: Songs for Ghosts by Clara Kumagai; I Am the Cage by Allison Sweet Grant; Every Borrowed Beat by Erin Stewart; Pieces of Us by Stewart Foster; and Stealing Happy by Brian Conaghan. “Protagonists in novels for young people are far more likely than a regular human to stumble across an old journal that teaches them something about history (and whatever their current dilemma may be), in the same way that their homework assignments are often far more concerned with emotional journeys than any formal curricula.”
reviewed for the Irish Times in April: What Happens Online by Nathanael Lessore; Do You Ship It? by Beth Reekles; Red Flags by Sophie Jo; Solo by Gráinne O’Brien; The Girl with the Red Boots by Alex Wheatle; Matched Up by Jenny Ireland. “Cerys/her art is my OTP.”
also contributed to the Irish Times best 100 books of the 21st century, along with a bunch of fellow book nerds.
reviewed for Children’s Books Ireland: A Sick History of Medicine by Jelena Poleksic & Ella Kasperowicz. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, and best exemplified with Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories, that an ideal way to get young people excited about the past is to focus on the gross-out humour angle…”
with my reviewer-hat on, I’ll be delivering a workshop for young reviewers (16+) for the International Literature Festival of Dublin in May.
my short story collection, In The Movie Of Her Life, is out in the world now. Nice things people have said about it can be found here.