Lullaby, Leïla Slimani

Lullaby opens with the death of two childern at the hands of their nanny.
A beautifully written, heavy and bleak vision of modern parenthood and the juggle between work and family life - for both parents and nanny. The author astutely and simply picks holes in expectations and presents a Catch 22 without offering any solutions, or seemingly even sympathy. Slimani creates understandable, unlikeable characters you don’t want to identify with. They paint portraits of personality and power, the situation is bigger than the characters. The mood is deftly and subtly changed through the novel, both the reader and characters fail to notice or stall the shift until it is too late. Full, bleak and worrying modern fiction.

Why didn't they ask Evans? Agatha Christie

 

As expected this is a great murder mystery. Likeable ‘plucky’ characters and twists and turns, much more adventure than other Christie novels I’ve read. Hairs prickled on the back of my neck when we did finally discover who Evans was.

The Typees, Herman Melville

Typee tells the story of sailors who desert ship on islands in the South Sea and their contact with the ‘primitive’ people there. It is part adventure story, part amateur anthropological study, and very of it’s time.
Melville slips into long passages of description which can get very tedious, but on the whole it is a good read, all the more interesting as it is based on Melville’s own experiences.