This debut novel from CJ Tudor became a bestseller and has been sold in over 40 countries around the world. It’s well deserved hype, following a tricky plot with split timelines and an intimacy of narrative even through life-changing, traumatic events. We’re constantly given reasons to believe our narrator can’t be trusted, so throughout the book we have to question whether we are being given truth or woven further into a tangled web of lies.
Eddie has been shaped for life by the events that took place over several months when he was twelve years old. Beginning with the tragic accident at a local funfair that say a girl seriously injured, and ending with her brutal murder months later, no-one is sure if everything that happens is accidental, or if there’s something more sinister at play. The chalk drawings that show up around the town at the same time suggest there’s someone behind each tragedy. But who?
The town has moved on, although Eddie has become an alcoholic, until one of his old friends shows up. Mickey claims that he knows who really killed Elisa, and wants to write a book telling all about that summer. He wants Eddie’s help. When Mickey goes missing, Eddie wakes up to find his hearth covered in the same chalk drawings from his childhood, he’s forced to track back over the story himself to see if he can find a solution.
It’s a dark story of secrets and scandal. There’s some depiction of sexual assault, and underage sex, threats and abuse. And we’re never entirely sure about Eddie’s trustworthiness. Between his alcoholism, the references to his dad’s early-onset dementia, and his own confession to casual shoplifting as a child, there’s something that doesn’t necessarily sit comfortably or entirely accurately about his recollections.
It has the feeling of a Stephen King novel, It or The Body (perhaps better known by the film Stand By Me), or even Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Children coming of age, and changing because of a traumatic event, and there’s an eerie otherwordliness about the story that stays with you after, as you try to untangle what you have read.
Claire Ormsby-Potter lives in the Midlands with her very patient husband and very neurotic cat. She's an early career editor, who wants to spend all her professional and leisure time with books, and particularly loves genre fiction. At some point she may have to stop buying books for the sake of space and money, but today is not that day.
