Girl, look at the choices you are making

Multiple POVs, time skips, a dominant narrator who is blackout-drunk a large proportion of the time, this is a thriller in a new mould.

During the last year, I saw large numbers of people on my regular commute (train, in a nice complement) reading A Girl on the Train and, having heard good things (plus having seen that Emily Blunt was starring in the film), decided to give it a crack myself and somehow convinced my book club to put this on the list for February. (Okay, it wasn’t so hard. I suggested enough books for the 2016 book list that every book on the list is one of my suggestions. It’s going to be a decent year for reading, finally, thank goodness.)

Like Silence of the Lambs, the tension and suspense comes from the various plot threads unfolding piece by piece, often to different characters and able to be linked only be the reader, rather than relying on more blatant chills or gore. The drunken narrator is frustratingly alcoholic – you want to reach into the pages and shake her, clean her up, and take her to the nearest AA meeting – and the verisimilitude of her morning-after patchy memories suggests the author had a pretty excellent youth.

Highly recommend the audiobook, featuring Clare Corbett and Louise Brealey, for a night drive you are guaranteed to stay awake during.