SHARP OBJECTS
Gillian Flynn
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 0-297-85152-7
January 10th, 2007
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SHARP OBJECTS
Written by
GILLIAN
FLYNN
Entertainment Weekly chief TV Critic, Gillian Flynn,
has set herself a bit of a problem with her debut novel, Sharp
Objects: how on earth is she ever going to top this? With
writing heavyweights Stephen King and Harlan Coben already waxing lyrical
from the covers, it is easy to feel that over-hype might be playing a
part with the first attempts of “the next big thing”, but
whatever these two giants of fiction might be saying about the book, it
isn’t praise enough. It may only be January, but we may already
have the Book Of The Year in our hands here.
When two girls, aged nine and ten are abducted and killed in Wind Gap,
Missouri, Camille Preaker is sent back to her home town to report on
the crimes for her third-rate newspaper. Camille, self-described “white
trash from old money”, is the daughter of one of the richest families
in town. Long-haunted by a childhood tragedy and estranged from her
mother for years, Camille suddenly finds herself installed once again
in her family's Victorian mansion. There, she must reacquaint herself
with her distant mother and the half-sister she barely knows, a precocious
13-year-old who holds a disquieting grip on the town and surrounds herself
with a group of vampish teenage girls.
As Camille struggles to remain detached from the evidence, her relationship with her neurotic, hypochondriac mother threatens to topple her hard-won mental stability. Working alongside the police chief and a special agent from out of town, Camille tries to uncover the mystery of who killed these little girls and why. But there are deeper psychological puzzles: Why does Camille identify so strongly with the dead girls? And how is this connected to the death of another sister years earlier?
This is a class act and no mistake. Dark, intensely sinister and completely unputdownable, Sharp Objects is a compelling insight into the minds of not one, but of several troubled characters that remains fascinating from first page to last and leaves the reader both moved and exhausted.
The
way Flynn has managed to imbue a sense of atmosphere into even the most
mundane of objects and surroundings, without ever being overly graphic,
is almost beyond belief, whereas her grip on dialogue is that of a boa
constrictor in the way it squeezes the maximum amount of intensity from
the minimum of words.
Sharp Objects
is going to be a novel that is hard to beat and its author, Gillian
Flynn, is soon going to be a name to rank alongside Cornwell, Reichs
and Hayder in the way her debut is set to take the crime world by storm
and shake it for all of its worth.
10/10
Thursday
11th January 2006
BBC Five Live Book of the Month with Simon Mayo.
Listen to the interview with Gillian Flynn in which the panel and author discuss Sharp Objects. (8:56)
Real Audio - streaming media version | MP3 Download
“Chris is not only a great writer, but
a sharp reader I absolutely trust. His website reminds me how many stunning
books are out there, and that's a very good thing.”
Gillian
Flynn - February 2007
Order this book online - Linghams Booksellers
break the rules as I see fit.” - Chris High 2003.