Kathy O’Shaughnessy
Vanishing Act
Ever since Gillian Flynn’s bestselling Gone Girl, the words ‘psychological thriller’ have loomed large in writers’ minds. Emma Healey’s new book, Whistle in the Dark, fulfils the brief, but with an interesting twist. While Gone Girl was brilliant, but also nasty and fantastical, Healey’s book takes us into the world of a family we recognise. This is ordinary life gone wrong – a hell, in other words, to which we can relate.
At the beginning, Jen and Hugh’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Lana, is in the news. On an ‘art holiday’ with Jen in the Peak District, she goes missing for four days, before being found in the countryside, her sweater matted with blood, a gash on her scalp, strange marks on her ankles and her clothing wet, although it hasn’t rained. What happened in that time? ‘Nothing,’ she says to the police and her parents.
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The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties