Snap: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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View image in fullscreen ‘Without having read Salem’s Lot, I would never have written Blacklands the way I did’ … Lance Kerwin and James Mason in the 1979 adaptation. Three years later, Jack is trying to keep up a facade of normality and stop his little sisters from being taken into care. Their home is filled to the rafters with walls of newspapers, amidst which the children burrow and live. I don’t even know what the worst part was: the running commentary on how pregnant women are essentially moronic (apparently ‘baby brain’ doesn’t mean ‘where did I leave my car keys,’ it means ‘my house was broken into and the burglar left a death threat on my pillow, but I won’t tell my husband, I don’t want to worry him!

I was also made quite uncomfortable about how disinterested we can be about other people’s lives and how they can be living lives of deep awfulness but we choose not to get involved, not to notice or offer help. The issues of hoarding, loss, grief, mental illness are all explored in both a sensitive and thought-provoking manner. The author really had a knack for creating vibrant and evocative settings and realistic, passionate and memorable characters that leaped off the page. Your English is perfect but I’m just curious because I was talking to another ESL reader whose English is flawless, but she said books written in dialect are difficult for her to read.Marvel is unconventional, a direct opposite of Reynolds, who plays by the book and has great expectations of himself. I would say if you were looking for a fast-paced/thrilling psychological thriller then you might have been slightly disappointed. Reynolds and Marvel are completely different characters - Reynolds is meticulous in every aspect of his life, not one to push the boundaries. And just like so many killers in crime novels, this one uses a murder weapon that is unique and easily traceable – and the case is ultimately solved using information that was available to the police at the time of the murder.

I found this an intriguing and intelligent character exploration which induced some very deep feelings in me as I read and became absorbed in not only the lives of the characters but also in the plot. Snap opens with three children sitting in a sweltering car by the side of the motorway waiting for their mother to come back with help. I could feel his emotions as he struggled with the heavy burden of caring for his sisters; I especially loved his relationship with little Merry. I truly believe that any reasonable reader can find the emphasis in a well-worded sentence without having it pointed out; Italics and exclamation points are little more than shortcuts.I’ve talked before about the near-impossibility of divorcing your experience with a book from the context in which you read it; who knows how I would have reacted to this if I’d approached it as a guilty-pleasure thriller and not as a Man Booker nominee, but I did read it as a Man Booker nominee, and I’m at a loss as to how this run-of-the-mill, anticlimactic, bland thriller was able to hoodwink five judges into thinking it’s anything more than a supremely underwhelming contribution to the genre (Val McDermid’s influence aside). Pregnant Eileen Bright leaves her three children in stifling heat - Jack, Joy and baby Merry - in a broken down car to phone for help, only she doesn't come back. The story then takes place 3 years later and shows how Jack and his sisters are dealing with everything. I really think it's tough for authors out there to come up with unique and interesting thrillers lately.

I completely agree, I find it so frustrating that people are going to hold up this book as a reason why genre fiction shouldn’t be eligible for the Booker, especially when really excellent genre fiction has been nominated and has won in the past. we don’t care: the storytelling - the wonderful characters with all they are grappling with, make us happy campers readers! Even at sentence level the writing is pared down, brisk and sharp with naturalistic dialogue that drives the story on so that reading it becomes absolutely addictive. Belinda Bauer's plots are never anything less than original and unsettling, and her latest outing is no exception.Eventually her body is found, and the effect of her loss on the family is devastating and unbearable, especially for Jack’s father. I hope I’ve interested you enough that you will run and get this book as soon as it’s published, it’s that good! The story begins in 1998 where three children Jack, Merry, and Joy are left abandoned in their car by their mother, Eileen on the side of the road. It's not that I am against including genre fiction, on the contrary, but this book does not have anything to say, it's just a solid mystery, a beach read. I absolutely considered ending every sentence in my review with an exclamation point but decided that would be too obnoxious.

We also feel like this is a marketing stunt: A Booker nominee for all those people who don't want to deal with Saunders/Smith/Cusk/McCormack-level complexity. Clever, clever, clever, both the author in putting together this taut thriller, and young Jack, our spunky hero. Kate Atkinson used to be the undisputed master of this sort of mixture of the serious, the exciting and the anarchic, but Bauer is now firmly in her class.Although Jack embarks on a dangerous game to find his mother’s killer, and although the police, in the form of the gloriously misanthropic DCI John Marvel, are pulled into the hunt, it was exploring the psychology of the children that Bauer found “most interesting”. About a medical student with Asperger’s who is out to solve a murder, Rubbernecker won the Theakston’s Old Peculier crime novel of the year prize. The emotional rollercoaster that Belinda Bauer sets us on is a large part of what makes this novel such a treasure. I think the only graphic novel I’ve ever read is Fun Home which I adored, but I was already familiar with the musical and invested in Allison Bechdel… I’m just not crazy about the form. Having seen some very mixed reviews about this one I was looking forward to getting my teeth into this read!