Un thriller con sfumature horror.Veramente bello ( )

What an amazing book - clever, complicated, compulsively readable, it's full of twists and turns. Just the sort of thing I like reading. Hoping to read a lot more by this author. ( )

Non sono riuscito ad arrivare alla fine del libro anche se mi mancavano cinquanta pagine. ( )

Na een vijfde van het boek te hebben gelezen merkte ik dat het eigenlijk nergens over ging. Dus het boek maar in een hoek gesodemieterd. Zonde van de tijd.

This novel tells the story of a little girl, who appears one day on a seaside promenade with a black flower in a handbag and who is terrified of going back home. This is the central event which still resonates three decades later with consequences for everyone in the book.

A very intriguing premise, this book sets up the reader with certain expectations as to where the plot might be heading, only to turn these expectations on their heads. The book starts innocuously enough, in what the reader perceives to be an ordinary, if unusual, topsy-turvy beginning to a crime novel, only to find that it is actually part of a book within a book, one that plays a major part within the novel itself. Does fiction become fact if it's repeated often enough? The author plays with this idea and the correlation between cause and effect: ideas begetting actions, actions begetting ideas that are turned into words, words generating other ideas that are turned into action again. It's all beautifully crafted, one part of the story fitting seamlessly into another like a set of matryoshka dolls. So it's a little disappointing that the writing style is somewhat inconsistent in places: somewhat too simplistic, occasionally trite and obvious, whereas other parts are atmospheric and evocative. But when you find yourself trapped in the midst of such an intricately woven web, for once you are content just to admire the spider's craft and skill.

(Review was originally written as part of Amazon's Vine programme.) ( )