It's A Bookiful Day

This Tammy Cohen novel is an absolute masterpiece, a page turner and a truly gripping story. Telling the tale of a series of murders in rich, suburban London, Cohen weaves the stories of the victims' families in the aftermath of attacks on young girls that simply keep occurring... 

Welcome to the club no one wants to join.

From my description, you might feel a desire to miss this one out - who wants to read a novel about gruesome child murders? Well, the truth is that it’s a piece of writing that, despite its central theme, is woven with real compassion and empathy towards its central characters. As spouses, siblings, families and friends cling together in the midst of unimaginable pain and tragedy, Cohen reveals what is at the heart of our human relationships. 

But as the bereaved parents gather to offer support in the wake of another killing, a crack appears in the group that threatens to rock their lives all over again.

Ooh – creepy, creepy, creepy! I would not read this book unless you have either a very strong stomach, or a penchant for rather grisly murder mysteries.

Having hung up his badge after a terrible accident, quadriplegic Lincoln Rhyme, ex-head of NYPD forensics, is drawn back into a case he simply cannot refuse. A murder occurs that is so beastly – and seemingly so unsolvable – that the detective cannot help but try and solve it. His search for the murderer leads him directly to a man he refers to as ‘The Bone Collector.’ Yep, it’s as horrific as it sounds.

Sometimes you can’t be what you ought to be, you can’t have what you ought to have.

This is the chilling tale of a wife in search of her husband, Matt. Rosamund Lupton weaves the story of Yasmin and her deaf daughter, Ruby, who, having travelled deep into Alaska, are greeted with the news that Matt has died in a tragic fire. Unable to accept this truth, Yasmin takes her daughter on a mission to find her husband, to the heart of one of the world’s most unwelcoming terrains.

His last night, the sky was cloudless with a full moon lighting the snowy terrain in an opalescent blue light. He remembered Yasmin telling him that the moonlight that reaches Earth is mainly the reflected light from the sun with some starlight and Earthlight thrown in. She'd told him that the light wasn't really blue, it was because of the Purkinje effect, a flaw in the human eye, that made it so. And he'd thought that what we know is filtered by our flaws, and sometimes turned more beautiful by them.

Desperate to reach Anaktue and to find her husband, who she very much believes is still alive, Yasmin suddenly has the unnerving sensation that she and Ruby are being followed. Perhaps, in fact, Matt’s supposed death is more suspicious than she initially thought? Battling minus temperatures, ferocious storms and icy winds, the pair persevere deeper into the darkness and further from human civilization. However, with every pained step and victorious mile, whoever is following them is starting to get closer…

Cold felt like it was a hunter and she was warm prey. 

Have you ever opened the pages of a book, fearing that your story might be the one it tells? No, me neither. But you will feel that way once you’ve read this novel.

Renée Knight’s Disclaimer tells the story of a woman who is lulled into a false sense of security by the opening of a book, only to realise that she is the central character and that her secret, the one she thought no one else knew, has been broadcast for the world to read.

“The act of keeping the secret a secret has almost become bigger than the secret itself.”

The story returns to a holiday twenty years before, during which Catherine’s husband leaves early due to an urgent work meeting. Left alone with her baby son, something happens on a foreign beach that will haunt her for the rest of her life. A death or a murder? An affair or something worse? A betrayal or a violation?

Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke continues to author her pain, threateningly crossing out the disclaimer on the cover of his book: that events or persons represented in this book bear no resemblance to any real events or persons living. And as copies begin to circulate beyond the one found lying innocently on her bedside table, Catherine’s world begins to fall apart as she tries to escape her fate brutally penned on the last pages…

Karen Perry’s Only We Know is a thrilling, suspense-filled drama spanning two continents, two families and two decades. Flashing between Kenya in the early 1980s and Dublin in 2013, this story slowly unravels a series of shocking events which took place when Luke, Nick and Katie were only children.

A tragic accident, that’s how it’s phrased. But is the death of a young girl in a river in the Maasai Mara really as free from guilt and retribution as it initially sounds? Told from the perspectives of the family and friends who were present that day, Perry pieces together an intricate web that has one final, chilling twist at its centre.

First, a desperate plea, PLEASE don’t watch the film version of this! You might be so saddened when you turn that last page that you are tempted to seek solace in the screen of your laptop but… don’t. The film version - with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess - loses so much of the magic of David Nicholls’ writing, that it might as well not be an adaptation at all.

This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.

This is the story of Emma and Dexter, friends who spend their graduation night together in Edinburgh on 15th July 1988. A passionate love that never quite gets off the ground, the novel tracks their friendship every year, on the same day and charts the story of how one day, any day, can change your life.

Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I’ll always remember it.

As life pushes Emma and Dexter down different paths, their relationship changes dramatically. With Dexter a famous, rich, drunken and drugged-up TV presenter and Emma, a hopeless waitress and aspiring writer, these friends verge so far from each other’s worlds that, at times, it seems they have nothing in common. But, in truth, they have each other in common and an unspoken understanding that no one else can grasp.

You can live your whole life not realizing that what you’re looking for is right in front of you.

As their stories endlessly converge and diverge, at different times the pair wonder if they should be together… Em and Dex, Dex and Em… Or, by contrast, if they should never see each other again.

I love you, Dex, so much. I just don’t like you anymore.

I had often glimpsed Jojo Moyes’ book covers in bookshops, but I wasn’t convinced her writing style was going to suit me. Something about the curly letters and cutesy colours put me off, surely I wasn’t going to read a piece of ‘chick lit’? I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height.

The story follows Louisa Clark, simultaneously recovering from a fall from the roof of her apartment building, as well as the fact that the man she loved, Will, recently ended his life at Dignitas. As the story progresses, we discover that Will had a daughter - a child he did not know about - and that this moody, adolescent girl wants to know everything about her father, including the woman who supported his decision to end his life. Becoming increasingly wrapped up in Lily’s turbulent home life, her own grief and the emotional scars of Will’s fractured family, Lou has to come to terms with her past, as well as grapple with her future. 

You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone . . . There is a hunger in you, Clark. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do. Just live well. Just live.

Forced to re-evaluate her situation, a transformation takes place on the pages of this book that left me turning (or, tapping on my Kindle) the pages so fast that I devoured this book within a day. There is something so kind and humane in Moyes’ writing, a real tenderness in the way she handles topics of grief, love and hopelessness that, at times, I found myself welling up on the Eurostar.

The only way to avoid being left behind was to start moving.