I was all excited last night when I got home from work and there was a very strange message on my answering machine - it was a computer recorded message from my local library telling me that a book I had put a hold on was now ready for collection - to a non-book person that might not sound too exciting but it made my day!
The book is Novel About My Wife By Emily Perkins and I made a trip to the library after work tonight to pick it up.
I had seen the book in bookshops a while ago - I was attracted to the stunning cover - but when I read the blurb about what the book was about I wasn't really all that interested in taking it any further. That all changed when I heard an interview with the author on a local radio station a couple of weeks ago. Emily Perkins sounded lovely - not quite sure why that should matter - the book should sound lovely I would have thought and who gives a damn about the author!! But for some reason my connection to the author as she spoke about the book made me want to give in another go - hence the request through my library.
A quote from one of my favourite writers, Maggie O'Farrell, on the front of the cover didn't hurt in steering me towards picking this one up either;
A beautiful, shocking book, it had me gripped from the very first sentence
The product description from Amazon describes the book in this way:
A chilling gothic tale about a gorgeous young wife’s descent into madness, from a rising literary star.When Tom moves with his wife, Ann, from their tiny Camden flat into a large house in Hackney, he feels as if it’s the start of the rest of their life together. Deeply in love, and with a baby on the way, Tom thinks everything is finally coming together. He and Ann anticipate the arrival of the baby, as Ann, particularly galvanized, spends hours cleaning and reorganizing the house, and sitting up all night talking with a renewed passion about life, love, and art. But there is a darker side to this new fervor, somehow linked with her conviction that someone is lingering threateningly around their new home. Someone who—Tom soon realizes—may not exist at all.
Sounds like an interesting read!
