Cleo: How an uppity cat helped heal a family by Helen Brown

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In the early 1980s, Helen Brown was a 20-something journalist mum of two adored boys: Sam (almost 9) and Rob (6). Helen and the boys’ father, Steve, had married very young and were having some problems, but their Wellington home was largely happy and the boys were thriving. In anticipation of his upcoming birthday, the family had visited the home of a friend whose cat had just given birth, and Sam picked out a vivacious black kitten. He named her after the Egyptian queen in recognition of her regal bearing and glossy coat. She would be ready to leave her mother in a few weeks, and Sam couldn’t wait; he loved all animals.

Sam was killed a week later when, having found an injured bird, he stepped out in front of a car near the Brown home as he carried it to the vet. His little brother was with him. Brown writes with exquisite pathos of the initial weeks following his death, and their punctuation by the arrival of Cleo, now of age, at her new home. The devastated family had forgotten all about her, and Brown’s first instinct was to send her back; it wasn’t the time for a new pet. But Rob loved her, and she wasted no time creeping into her new mistress’ heart.

What follows is the life story of both a cat and a family; it is no spoiler to say that the Browns’ marriage broke up, that Brown met someone new and that Rob didn’t remain an only child for long. Brown recounts the ups and downs that accompanied Cleo’s nearly 25-year lifespan, including, in one of the funniest and warmest passages, a ‘gap’ year in the UK and Europe by Brown and her new partner, Philip.

Cleo was left behind with a trusted friend; the couple decided, in a fit of romantic devotion, to marry in Switzerland. It swiftly became apparent that the Swiss authorities were determined to deny their wish, demanding that all personal documents dating back to high school be produced and witnessed in triplicate. When that criterion was met, they imposed a rule that the marriage would be legal only if performed by an English-speaking Swiss minister, and such a creature proved nearly impossible to find.

Sensitive readers should be warned; this is at times a very saddening book, not only due to Sam’s death but because it cover’s Cleo’s life from birth to death, and the ‘high priestess’ of the Brown family is as real as any human Brown describes. I was struck by how well, and cogently, Brown wrote about the loss of her son; she has addressed the subject in some of her many columns in the former Dominion and in Next magazine, and her talent for concise, direct and affecting writing is on full display here.

Anyone who has loved a pet, laughed at their antics and taken solace in their company will relish this book, which Brown dedicates to “anyone who says they’re not a cat person, but secretly is.” For a special treat, visit www.helenbrown.com and read Cleo’s blog. She’s reporting from cat heaven, and in one of the recent entries bemoans the surfeit of farmed salmon. A personality as strong as this one doesn’t go away.

3.5/5 Stars:  Funny, touching, and one of the loveliest stories of a family I have read in a long while.

Ali’s Book of Tall Tales by Ali Williams

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

If a talented young sportsman absolutely must produce a book about his career to date, best that it be exactly like this effort from All Black lock (none of your David Beckham hagiography, thanks, especially when he doesn’t even mention the nanny. Pet peeve, sorry. Moving on).

It consists of a series of stories about life as a highly recognizable football player in a rugby-mad nation, in no particular order – Williams veers from the sublime (his swift and straightforward rise to national representation) to the dramatic (the truth about why he was sent home in the midst of a Blues campaign in South Africa) via the painful (a broken jaw and six weeks of nothing but liquid food, compounded by the indignity of being visited in hospital by drunk, partying team-mates. On a related note, his account of trying to turn two Burger Wisconsin burgers into a meatshake is hilarious).

One of the most widely reported tales at the time of publication was the spiking of a beer-filled rugby trophy with Viagra and the feeding of the contents to several in the vicinity, including All Black coach Graham Henry. Henry was characteristically taciturn when quizzed on the subject, but a couple of Williams’ team-mates were more forthcoming, and it makes for some cringe-worthy reading.

Williams is responsible for this book’s many side-splitting anecdotes, but James Griffin (best known for co-creating and writing Outrageous Fortune) deserves all the credit for its construction. The piss-taking tone is spot-on and quite perfectly Kiwi (Griffin knows better than to lace the pages with self-deprecation – this would be un-Ali).

Right at the end, Williams clears up a small matter of mispronunciation: his name is pronounced as in, “Wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley,” rather than as in Muhammad Ali. Williams has had a bad run with injuries and is currently down for the count with a torn Achilles tendon, but hopefully he’ll be back on the pitch soon. There are more anecdotes to be generated – this book needs a sequel.

3/5 Stars: An engaging piss-take from start to finish, and you don’t need to be a rugby fan to get the humour.

Gone by Mo Hayder

Those new to Mo Hayder but partial to a gripping thriller will be tantalized by the author blurb in this seventh crime novel from the British writer: “Mo Hayder has written some of the most terrifying crime thrillers you will ever read. Her first novel, Birdman, was hailed as a ‘first-class shocker’ by the Guardian and her follow-up, The Treatment, was voted by The Times one of ‘the top ten most scary thrillers ever written.’”

Crikey. Nothing like the weight of expectation. Happily, this is a case of underpromising and overdelivering. Gone is lengthy, at more than 400 densely-packed pages, but plotted with extreme skill. It doesn’t flag for a moment, and Hayder expertly balances the main storyline with a related sub-plot (the woman Caffery yearns for, police diver Sergeant Flea Marley, undertakes her own, subterranean search to find the villain at the centre of the story).

The best thrillers kick into action immediately, and accordingly, the first page of Gone has Hayder’s recurring protagonist, DI Jack Caffery, contemplating a crime scene. It happens to be a public street in which a Santa Claus mask-wearing man wrestled a woman away from her car and drove off – with her young daughter in the back seat.

Several similar incidents quickly follow, and it becomes apparent to Caffery and his team that this serial offender wants something more than either the cars or the children. But the preternatural intelligence and foresight of the Jacker, as he becomes known, is stymieing the investigators: it’s as if he has access to information that is so high-level even the police can’t get at it. But what? And what is he after?

In desperation, Caffery turns to the Walking Man, a middle-aged vagrant whom Caffery is in the habit of visiting. The Walking Man is well-known to locals as a former successful businessman whose young daughter was abducted, raped and murdered by an itinerant offender on probation. The Walking Man took grisly revenge on the killer, and now spends his days roaming the countryside, searching for his daughter’s body and sleeping rough.

Gone is the third novel from Hayder to feature the Walking Man, whose bond with Caffery adds complexity and richness to the story (they are close in part because Caffery’s brother went missing at age eight, and the offender, probably a local paedophile, was never brought to justice). Caffery sees the Walking Man as possessing unique and valuable wisdom. As Hayder writes: “[Caffery had] learned that in this relationship, he was the pupil and the Walking Man was the teacher.”

(A note for sensitive readers: Hayder’s oeuvre as a whole is one in which bad things happening to children is a recurring theme.)

It’s always best to reserve judgement on a book, especially one in this genre, where the pay-off is all. At times, I found myself holding my breath while reading Gone; I was enjoying it so much, and so clueless as to what was coming next, that I desperately hoped Hayder could deliver. She does.

It’s a great treat to discover a new favourite writer, and Hayder, with her knack for plotting and the evocation of mood, is one for any fan of clever, suspenseful fiction.

4/5 Stars: Truly stunning, but not for the faint-hearted.  Follow this link for more Easy Mix Book Reviews

Stolen by Lesley Pearse

If I were of a mathematical bent, I could probably calculate a formula to determine what proportion of a thriller’s success relies on the initial premise, and what proportion on delivery (plot, characterization, quality of writing). Suffice it to say, Stolen has one of the stronger openings I’ve read – the action starts on the first page and doesn’t let up.

Pearse is a beloved novelist in her native UK, and her books have sold two million copies worldwide. Stolen is the 13^th, and it begins with Lotte, a beautiful young blonde, being washed up half-drowned on a beach in Selsey. Her hair has been roughly hacked off, and the purple marks on her wrists and ankles indicate she has been in restraints.

Once revived and hospitalized, Lotte is diagnosed with trauma-related amnesia. Her Jane-Doe status is revoked when Dale, a Brighton hairdresser, recognizes Lotte as the friend she made when the two met on a cruise ship they worked on a couple of years earlier. Towards the end of the cruise, Lotte was raped and then taken under the wing of a God-fearing American couple, and the two women lost touch.

Things get especially interesting when Lotte’s memory begins to resurface, and what she recollects prompts action by her friends and family – leading Lotte and Dale into a confrontation with Lotte’s former ‘rescuers’. Be warned: what has happened to Lotte is every bit as dark as what you might encounter in a Val McDermid or Ian Rankin tale. (I was rather fooled by the chick-lit cover.)

Lotte’s recovery of her memory is what drives the story and prompts the major turning point in the plot. I felt that the remembering is rendered in less than artful fashion; it occurs in a series of conversations between Lotte and other characters, whereas scenes of Lotte alone, recalling, would have been far more affecting. Pearce seems to prefer plot to character development, and she does achieve on that front.

I find it helpful, rather than limiting, to think of novels in genre terms; the if-you-liked-that-you’ll-like-this in a review frequently leads me to my next read. Stolen isn’t easy to define; it’s a suspense thriller, certainly, but there are elements of chick-lit in the romantic connections made and the triumphant female friendship of Dale and Lotte, not to mention the rallying-round of various friends and family members (a Bridget Jones-ish touch that is a hallmark of this genre), and the comeuppance of one most unpleasant character.

It’s also fits into a sub-sub-genre that might be called recovery-from-amnesia fiction, though it’s not the finest instance of this (for a wildly different yet brilliant example, see Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series). Nonetheless, it achieves what I suspect was Pearse’s ambition: an absorbing, suspenseful tale that has something to say about the bonds of friendship, and the testing of them.

2.5/5 Stars:  Solid rather than mind-blowing.  Click here to see the Easy Mix book reviews

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

Last year’s historical-fiction sleeper hit was Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Long Song is the novel to fill that space in 2010. It has the requisite ingredients: a compelling setting (1830s Jamaica, as slavery comes to a bumpy, volatile end), a sympathetic main character (July, a slave girl who lives on a sugar plantation and whose erstwhile nemesis is a transplanted British widow), and a rollicking and drama-laden, yet plausible, plot.

One of the best-known ‘rules’ of fiction writing is to write what you know. Though it’s been a long time since anyone had first-hand knowledge of this particular subject, Andrea Levy brings a personal connection that tinges her story with pathos and empathy rather than melodrama (one of the biggest potential pitfalls for such a tale). Her complex background also explains how she can write so authentically and movingly about the collision of two cultures – in this case, the white plantation owners from Britain and the blacks (or negroes, as they were referred to at the time) and mulattoes who served them in the fields and homes of Jamaica.

Levy’s father sailed from Jamaica to England on the Empire Windrush ship in 1948, and her mother joined him soon after. Andrea was born in London in 1956, growing up black and the child of Caribbean immigrants in what was then still a very white country; she says this experience has given her a complex perspective on the country of her birth.

This ambivalence shines through in The Long Song, which, while it faces some of the horrors and injustices of slavery and its aftermath head-on, takes an even-handed approach to its characters. Levy refuses to tell us what to think of them, opting instead to simply present their motives and actions.

A portion of the book’s introduction explains its clever and unusual explication: You do not know me yet but I am the narrator of this work. My son Thomas, who is printing this book, tells me it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed.

The identity of Thomas’s mother, our storyteller, is a fact cleverly concealed by Levy until the end of the book, which focuses chiefly on July and the vicissitudes of her everyday existence. As a slave, her life is not her own, but one of the finest elements of The Long Song is the description of how she responds to the events in her life – there’s an illicit love affair, unexpected offspring, and at one point she is banished from the plantation – and how these happenings reveal the depths of her character.

I am curious as to how much of the character of July is based on Andrea Levy’s mother or other Jamaican women she has known – there is such a realness and spirit to the character that it is hardly to believe she is a complete invention.

This is an historical novel, but one of greater literary quality than many books in this genre – enhanced, I think, in large part by the depth of research Levy has undertaken (there is a bibliography at the end) and her ear for the Jamaican patois and the distinctive rhythm of speech.

4/5 Stars: Few novels are compelling and informative in equal parts – this is one.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio Review

Rainwater by Sandra Brown

Sandra Brown already has quite a pedigree, as the writer of nearly two dozen thrillers, several of them New York Times bestsellers.

With Rainwater she is attempting something very different from her standard yarn. This occurs with some regularity among writers who are very well-established and successful in one specific genre (the John Grishams and Stephen Kings): burning away in the brain is an idea for another story entirely, and one which may not appeal to their existing fan base.

Brown writes in the preface to Rainwater that she wrote this on the sly – she was working on two other contracted books at the time, and none of her business associates were aware of this little project, so she submitted the finished manuscript with trepidation, conscious of its difference to her previous work and uncertain about how it would be received.

She needn’t have feared. Rainwater is a very special story, an addictive tale that is beautifully constructed and above all very readable. The story of what happens to a lonely single mother when a mysterious new lodger arrives at her boarding house in Depression-era Texas, I drank it up in two evenings, and I suspect even the most time-poor would be reluctant to stretch out their reading much further than that – the characterization and plot are so strong that you simply must find out the fates of the people that sneak into your heart.

At the novel’s opening, Ella Barron’s lodgers are two elderly spinster sisters and a travelling salesman. Ella has an autistic young son, Solly, but with autism not yet identified as a medical condition, Solly is generally viewed as the town idiot. Ella lives with the fear that if he behaves strangely in public, he may be taken from her and placed in one of the many nightmarish facilities for the mentally ill.

She has an orderly, proscribed, regimented life until one day the local doctor introduces a young man, Mr Rainwater, who is looking to board in one of her rooms. Ella, who for her own safety has become highly attuned to the hidden and unspoken, knows something is up, and learns that Mr Rainwater is terminally ill with only months to live.

It’s the perfect set-up for a poignant love story, and Brown doesn’t disappoint – she draws out the tension beautifully and steers clear of the melodrama and sentimentality that can turn a strong premise into soupy treacle.

One of my favourite elements was Sandra Brown’s exploration of the history of this area, particularly in relation to a government-run cattle programme designed to boost the dire provincial economy. For many thousands of farmers, their businesses were no longer economically viable, so the government slaughtered their stock and paid them per head of cattle (curiously, the carcasses were thrown away, to be pursued by starving townspeople and slum-dwellers). Cleverly, Brown molds this historical datum into a tense plot development relating to a local sociopath who has unfinished business with Ella.

Rainwater is a rather literary novel in terms of its austerity and its refusal to give the reader the ending they might prefer, but despite the many sadnesses in the story, I found it hopeful, uplifting and quite unlike any other recent novel. However, in it’s blending of the historical and the personal, I suspect it will strike a chord with fans of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 smash-hit The Help. Highly recommended.

4/5 Stars: More than just another historical love story.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio Review

Open: By Andre Agassi

Preceding Open’s publication was a classic media frenzy, stemming from the revelation that the text contained an admission by Agassi, one of tennis’ most beloved practitioners, that he used pure methamphetamine for a period during his career. Everyone from Roger Federer to Boris Becker to Martina Navratilova weighed in with personal opinion, most of it harsh.

Click here to read my complete review of Open as a Personal Choice.

Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters by Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger

Until January 15, 2009, Chesley Sullenberger, known to all as Sully, was just one of around 5,000 commercial pilots employed by US Airways. He had five years of military training and service, and nearly 30 years’ commercial piloting (close to 20,000 hours of flight time), under his belt. He rose to international celebrity on that chilly day when he safely landed Flight 1549 in New York’s Hudson River after it was struck by a flock of Canada geese and lost all engine power. Sully saved the lives of all 155 people on board.

Highest Duty features a detailed account of what happened that day, but above all it’s a story of an American life lived with true goodness. What happened to Sully’s plane that day is a once-in-a-decade occurrence anywhere in the world; as he says, most commercial airline pilots will serve an entire career without losing even one engine. His calmness in handling such an unlikely and profoundly hazardous situation is explained by his account of his history of piloting. He fell in love with flying at the age of 19, when a local flight instructor in Sully’s hometown of Denison, Texas, began giving him lessons.

Despite his family’s shortage of money, Sully’s father, recognizing his son’s passion and talent and wanting to support his goals, found the money to fund most of the cost of the weekly lessons; Sully paid for the rest through after-school jobs.

Sully went on to train at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado, and then served in the US Air Force, attaining the rank of captain. Crucially for his ill-fated flight many years later, he was a member of the official aircraft accident investigation board while in the Air Force, and then, as a civilian pilot, he served as an accident investigator. The many things he learned about aircraft incidents, including his study of a number of cases involving planes landing unexpectedly in water, contributed to the wealth of knowledge that allowed him keep the aircraft in one piece when he hit the Hudson.

Sully writes movingly about his wife, Lorrie, and their two daughters Kate and Kelly, and confesses that the very qualities that have made him an outstanding pilot – perfectionism, attention to detail, ability to control emotion, being extremely organized – have made him hard to live with. He says his wife has told him more than once: “Sully, life is not a checklist.”

But the real reason to read this book – and you should – is Sully’s detailed account of what happened that cold January day. His remarkable recall is aided by the cockpit recording (a full transcript and flight path illustration are included at the back of the book) of the words exchanged with his co-pilot Jeff Skiles and with the air traffic controller on the ground, Patrick Harten.

And just as Agassi’s book is not really about tennis, Sully’s is about much more than flying. I loved reading about the tens of thousands of people who sent him letters and emails in the wake of the landing: some were relatives of those whose lives he saved; others were people who had themselves survived plane crashes and wanted to share their memories; most were simply moved by the powerful story of catastrophe so skillfully averted. Few people have ever been yanked from anonymity as deservedly as Sully.

Worst Case by James Patterson

I knew James Patterson was one of the more prolific crime writers working today, but I did a double-take when I read a few months ago that he had signed a 17-book deal with his publisher to take him through to 2012 – that’s around six books a year.

I didn’t have the foggiest idea how he was going to pull that off until I saw that the cover of Worst Case attributes the book to Patterson . . . and one Michael Ledwidge. On closer inspection of Patterson’s many other titles, most of them, apart from the famous Alex Cross series, have been written in concert with others (a bit like Michelangelo and his students, a fan might say – Patterson is clearly a skilled delegator as well as a master crime writer)

Worst Case revives one of Patterson’s regular protagonists, Detective Michael Bennett of the NYPD, who is called to investigate the kidnapping of the teenage son of a billionaire industrialist. Several similar abductions rapidly ensue.

Although the police are stymied as to why wealthy young people are being targeted, we readers are in the advantageous position of being able to meet the kidnapper early in the book and learn that his lofty goal is to ascertain the degree of his captive’s social consciousness by quizzing them about social justice, environmental issues and related topics. All of this is connected to how the vast sea of money that supports their cosseted lifestyles is earned, and needless to say, our villain has rather strong views – so strong, in fact, that if the helpless kidnap victims don’t come up with the right answer, they die.

A few unfortunate teenagers do meet a premature end due to their lack of required knowledge. At the same time, the parents use their influence to turn up the heat on the authorities and the media (and a entertainingly annoying, obtuse deputy mayor, who makes a couple of memorable appearances), which brings fetching FBI agent Emily Parker into the story.

Worst Case is a good potboiler – there is nothing stunningly original about the plot, but the novel has some deft, appealing touches, my favourites being the scenes of Michael Bennett’s frantic home life. He has 10 (that is not a typo) children, all adopted with his wife, who passed away two years ago. Michael stoically combines full-time killer-hunting with raising them, with the help of his father, a priest, and a long-suffering nanny, Mary Catherine, who carries a torch for him. Can’t blame her – he is not the most fleshed-out of crime heroes, but his manner is unusually endearing.

For me, the family scenes (particularly an early passage in which he invites Emily home for dinner without warning her first what she will be walking into) add a layer of humanity and warmth to the book, which helps both to draw you to Michael and to offset the unpleasantness of what is happening to children elsewhere. I’d be interested to know if Patterson or Ledwidge is chiefly responsible for this.

The speed of production has meant this book is highly topical – the relationship of corporate malfeasance to the recession, and big-city terrorism, both warrant some of the authors’ attention.

3/5 Stars – Patterson books are a bit like buses, in that if you miss one, there’ll be another along shortly – and I see on his website that Worst Case is one of five listed for release in 2010 – but you can always be assured of an entertaining and diverting ride.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio Review.

The Queen of New Beginnings by Erica James

For fans of light-hearted literature, Erica James will need no introduction; she’s written 13 bestselling novels with titles like A Breath of Fresh Air, Love and Devotion and It’s the Little Things, so you know you’re venturing into serious chick-lit territory when you embark on one of her books.

The Queen of New Beginnings has at its heart two primary characters. The first one we meet is Clayton Miller, an ostracized and deeply self-pitying comedy writer. He had a stellar career which came to a screeching halt around the time his long-term girlfriend left him for his best friend and writing partner. Unable to cope, Clayton has suffered a very public fall from grace and when we meet him at the novel’s opening, he has been banished by his agent to a remote house in the English countryside.

Enter Alice Shoemaker, a one-time actress and now voiceover artist who does some cleaning jobs on the side. Her first encounter with Clayton is a classic romantic-comedy ‘meet cute’, when she shows up to do some cleaning work at what happens to be her old childhood home and, for fun and because Clayton immediately strikes her as a pompous git, adopts the persona and accent of a Polish housekeeper called Katya.

They steadily overcome their initial hostility towards each other, and this is where the story really takes off. Through a series of conversations with Clayton, Alice recounts her experiences in the house and the highly dramatic events that occurred within her family (this makes for some unusually juicy reading, even by chick-lit standards); we find out how and why she became completely estranged from her father, and why she changed her surname so that none of her relatives could ever track her down.

Things develop romantically between the pair and it’s all going swimmingly until Clayton realizes that his writer’s block has been unstopped by Alice’s family story, and he finds himself writing a screenplay heavily based on her life. It’s all extremely personal, of course, and he knows that she would be furious and devastated if she found out – but when a production company wants to film it, and thus rescue his moribund career, Clayton finds himself having to choose between Alice and his work.

Ultimately, there’s not much in the way of suspense. Rather, it’s classic romantic-comedy writing in which it is clear the two protagonists will eventually find their way to each other but have to overcome things like pride and miscommunication and the more idiotic aspects of their own nature in order to do so. The journey is no less enjoyable for its predictability.

3/5 Stars - If you don’t know Erica James, it might help if I tell you that I found this novel to be very Marian Keyes-ish – it’s funny, with a good plot, and a reliable choice for the beach or the plane or just when you need some escapism.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio Review.

The Promised World by Lisa Tucker

Packing an emotional wallop in fiction writing can be achieved in a variety of ways, from the meat-headed (have a character strangle a kitten), to the artful (see most Henry James or Edith Wharton novels for examples of pained yearning). It helps to set up a premise that immediately puts the reader on unsteady ground, whether they’re unsure at the outset where they are (literally or figuratively) and what has occurred before the opening page, or, if there’s an initial event that drives the plot, they don’t know how that’s going to be responded to by the characters.

In The Promised World, Lisa Tucker uses the latter stratagem to draw the reader in. At kick-off, a young man named Billy Cole has committed ‘suicide by police’, leaving behind a wife, Ashley, and three young children. Just as importantly plot-wise, another of the bereaved is his twin, Lila, with whom he was extremely close, maybe even unnaturally so, as one character darkly insinuates.

Lila has a spouse herself, Patrick, but the couple has no children. Lila is an American literature scholar who has been completely devoted to her career, and though her husband would dearly love to become a father, his adoration of his wife is such that her wishes are paramount. Billy’s death hits Lila like a tanker, and she starts to withdraw into herself and her memories of her shared past with Billy. But the memories prove to be more tenuous than they should be, and chunks of her life seem to be missing.

As Lila starts to lose her sanity and a desperate Patrick tries to help, we discover there is much Lila and Billy haven’t told their loved ones about where they came from. The pair always said their parents are dead, for example, but on further investigation Patrick encounters some apparently murky reasons why Lila has always been reticent about discussing her childhood.

Meanwhile, Ashley copes with Billy’s absence by moving in a new boyfriend only a couple of weeks after his death, which precipitates some drastic action on the part of his two older children. This is what brings the novel to its climax and forces Lila to confront what she’s been running from throughout her adult life.

Tucker has used a clever device in this book: she’s told the story in the third-person, but changes the perspective around between main characters including Lila, Patrick, Ashley and Billy’s son, William, through alternating chapters. This allows her to reveal the plot from multiple points of view, an ideal way – when done well and even-handedly, as it is here – to reveal each character’s fears, insecurities and motives for action. It also facilitates the development of a key theme of the book, personal history as it relates to memory and shared experience.

This way, we learn about the nature of Billy and Ashley’s marriage as Ashley reflects on her past and deals with her children’s grief; we see Lila slowly melt down as she struggles with her mental health and her distrust of her own memory; and we find out how some characters, particularly the long-suffering Patrick, cope with the holding of secrets by those they love most.

The Promised World is at heart a family drama, but there are elements that are highly suspenseful and rather thriller-like. There’s nothing predictable or formulaic about it, and the story is tidily resolved by the final page.

2.5/5 Stars- Makes for a pleasing, absorbing weekend read, and it would be a chat-provoking choice for book clubs.  Click here to listen to the Easy Mix Audio review.