Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Speaking of cracked out, this book is more twisted than your nanna’s back. The chick-lit thriller of the moment, it’s a page-turner that I couldn’t put down (from an unofficial office straw poll of five workmates, they all smashed through it in the same way). It’s tight and more taut than Joan Rivers (alright I’ll stop with the bad analogies now). I can’t write much without giving the game away, but we start off by reading diary entries of the perfect Amy, about to celebrate her five-year anniversary with husband Nick. But the anniversary doesn’t happen when Amy inexplicably goes missing and the investigation turns to Nick. He then gets a turn at narrating, where we hear about his retrenchment from his dream magazine writing gig in New York, and he and Amy’s disappointment at having to move to his pokey home town in Missouri. Kernels of information are laid down by husband and wife, like a Hansel and Gretel trail of breadcrumbs leading to the truth. Of course there’s a humdinger of a plot twist which I won’t give away. It didn’t surprise me to read that it’s been earmarked for a movie adaptation, or that it flew off the shelves when it was released in mid-2012 (2 million copies and counting). It may not be literature but it shows that a good story is worth its weight in gold.

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

This book is seriously cracked out. It starts innocently enough, although with a fairly grim scenario where four strangers in a field bear witness to a tragic hot air balloon accident where a man is killed. The group are now bound by the tragedy, with each man thinking they could have done something more to save him. One of the men, Joe, is a freelance science writer who lives with his girlfriend Clarissa in London. One day soon after the freak incident, one of the other men who was at the scene, Jed, calls him out of the blue, saying all manner of strange things: “I love you”, “I want to be with you” ‘we’re meant to be together”. Leaves dozens of messages on his answering machine. Turns up at his house at night. Watches him from street corners. Makes thinly veiled threats to harm Clarissa so they can be together. Everything bar boiling the bunny or leaving a horse head in the bed. Joe goes to the police who just think he’s making it up, and Clarissa starts questioning his mental state. It’s all the more unsettling for the unusual male-on-male stalker set-up, and for the fact that Joe has done nothing to attract Jed’s infatuation. I felt a bit strange at the end of the book … scratched my head a little, did some laps around the block, had more tea and still undecided on whether or not this was a thumbs up or down. An ambiguous answer for an ambiguous book.

The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman

Another reason to write these STRAIGHT AFTER READING THEM. Or at least make notes. I read this quite some time ago, and remember very much enjoying it, but in keeping with the title, will need to make some sweeping statements about my enjoyment of it. Elilot Perlman has been described as one of the great ‘humanist’ writers of our generation, able to conjure up characters across the spectrum of age, race, gender to explore big themes of loss, memory, grief and redemption. Previous novel Seven Types of Ambiguity was certainly epic in scale but didn’t quite deliver the emotional pay off it promised (and after 800 or so pages, that was quite annoying), and perhaps experience and maturity have helped make this, his third novel, a more complete story. Three men with chequered pasts are our protagonists; an Australian academic based in New York who has recently been dumped and rejected for tenure; an African-American janitor fresh out of jail and searching for his six-year-old estranged daughter; and a Jewish Holocaust survivor whose last wish in life is share what happened in the camps. Like a literary carnival fairy floss spinner, wispy threads of stories are spun and spun until their three stories become one. It feels like a lot of research and a lot of love went into this book, and while there may be some parts that feel a touch laboured, I thought as a whole it was quite moving.