The Heights by Louise Candlish - Review

I requested this book at the library at like the beginning of May and picked it up and then ignored it for a while. I am very much a mood reader and can't ever make myself read something if I don't want to. But I took it on holiday and picked it up on our last day while we were at a spa in Helmsley. I've enjoyed the other books I've read by Louise Candlish but I found this an odd one. She writes a lot about social class which I don't ever mind but I do find it weird sometimes how she deals with it. 

The book has a story within a story, kind of. There's a woman writing an article for a newspaper about a creative writing class, and in that, Ellen is an attendee, so most of the book is from her point of view. But there are other points of view too which are needed but sometimes they end up telling the author too much. 

She is a lighting interior designer kind of person and one day she is working with a client in central London when she catches sight of a man on a high roof across the road. She recognises him as Kieran Watts - but surely, he is dead? She follows him over the next few days. He is the person she blames for ruining her life and her family's life. She catches up with him and realises he has had some plastic surgery. He is also going by a different name. Ellen is warned off by an older man in Kieran's life. 

She gets in touch with her ex partner, Vic. He, like her, thought that Kieran was dead, but he doesn't believe her to begin with. See, Kieran used to know their son, Lucas. Back in time five years, Lucas was paired with Kieran at the beginning of sixth form when Kieran was new to the school. Lucas was asked to buddy with him and they quickly became friends. Lucas' sometimes girlfriend, Jade, was a good friend of Kieran's too. To be honest, he seemed just like an ordinary teenager. He smokes weed, they like to go to parties and skip school sometimes, and he learns to drive. It's basically what I did when I was in 6th form, but Ellen absolutely loathes him.

She is married to Justin and they have a daughter, Freya, who is twelve. Ellen basically hates Kieran because she thinks he's below her family. He is in care and living with a foster mother. Her family is incredibly middle class and Ellen is just snotty towards Kieran. She doesn't believe that her darling son would EVER do anything wrong. That is the basis of the whole book.

I sort of don't want to give more details because it would be spoilers. But Ellen is sure that Kieran died, and now he is back. She becomes obsessed and of course it all goes off the rails. 

I did guess a couple of the twists. I quite liked the ending, but I found Ellen so insufferable that I struggled to sympathise with her throughout. I did feel sympathy for Vic, who seemed like a decent dad. I'm giving this three out of five. 

Our Holiday by Louise Candlish - Review

This is one of those books where nearly everyone in it is a terrible person. I actually don't mind that, because it means that the reader doesn't care enough about anyone, so anyone can be the suspect. But that made it hard to be sympathetic towards anyone, too. 

It's a couple of weeks since I read this book as I'm writing this and I think I've forgotten who everyone is, annoyingly, so let's see what I can dredge up... 

The book is set near Poole, in a village which has a lot of second home owners. Two of them are Charlotte and Perry and their son Benedict, who are from London and who have a shit ton of money. They tend to go to Pine Ridge for the entirety of August. This year Benedict is off at uni, leaving the nest a little bit empty. But he is coming for the summer in Dorset and bringing his girlfriend Tabitha. Charlotte is nervous to meet her, but looking forward to it too. 

Charlotte and Perry's friends, Amy and Lucas, have also bought a second home on the same street. It is much smaller and less grand than Charlotte and Perry's house, and it needs a lot of work, which Amy is going to oversee. Their children are Beattie, who is seventeen, and Huck, who is about fifteen I think? His French exchange partner Julien is also coming for part of the summer. 

Then there are the locals. They aren't happy that so many people from outside of the town have bought second homes there which means that the locals can't afford to rent there anymore and are stuck living in caravans and on people's sofas. They have formed a pressure group, headed by the charismatic Robbie, who is often on the local news talking about the issue. He has a girlfriend and his best friend is Tate, who works at a bar on the beach. They all live in caravans on the local holiday park. Tate's girlfriend Ellie works at the local spa hotel. They need the tourists around even though they have problems with them. 

Right at the beginning of the book Robbie is at the festival that is held at the end of the summer when he notices something happening on the cliff top. Something is sliding... into the sea. The book then goes back in time to show the build up to festival day and everything that happens before the building slides off the cliff. 

Charlotte's house has a summer house that is her pride and joy, so she's a bit piqued when Amy gets one for her house too. Beattie starts to sleep in theirs. Beattie starts a fling with Tate, and she also has a lot of secrets that she is trying to uncover. I didn't think this subplot was dealt with properly, actually. Charlotte and Amy are both yummy mummies who need to get lives and better things to worry about, I think. Benedict and Tabitha are portrayed as clueless Gen Zs who are so 'woke' and who are constantly trying to rile up their boomer/Gen X parents. Perry has a very big secret which is why he keeps on disappearing back to London. He's also an alcoholic. He is thoroughly unlikeable. 

I did have a lot of sympathy for the locals who just want safe, secure housing, and I think this is very realistic and I liked the way it was portrayed. I didn't care about who lived and died, though, which I find annoying. I'm giving this three out of five. 

The Skylight by Louise Candlish - Review

I got this Quick Reads book in a charity shop in Amble for just a pound when Lee and I were there over his birthday in August. I've enjoyed other books by Louise Candlish so thought I would give this a go. It's a novella, a short story really, and I picked it up after I made it through the slog that was Silas Marner. It was a very quick read and I really liked it! As with all short stories it left me wanting more, which I think is a mark of an excellent short story! 

Simone lives in the top half of a converted house, in a flat with two floors. Her boyfriend Jake has recently moved in with her. She has a secret - she's the only one allowed to use the top bathroom, and from there she can see the dining table of her downstairs neighbours because of the skylight in their extension. Jake has to use the shower room on the main floor so he doesn't know she can see into the skylight, and neither do the neighbours. And Simone absolutely HATES them.

They are a bit younger than her, and married, and successful, all of which are things which seem to trigger her. They are Alina and Gus and they are young professionals. They put the extension on which Simone didn't like, but now obsessed by what she can see. Simone hates Alina in particular, and starts stealing mail from the communal hall and other stuff like that, just to wind her up. 

Simone has a dark past - she only speaks to her cousin Paula from her family, and no one else. It's heavily hinted that she harmed someone when she was a child, but at the beginning the reader doesn't know what she did. Then she sees something through the skylight that sends her even more off the rails and she wants to get revenge, which has tragic consequences. I won't give spoilers but this is a twisty and delicious short story. I especially liked how it was told from Simone's point of view, as she's a very unreliable narrator. I'm giving this four out of five. 

Those People by Louise Candlish - Review

I've enjoyed Our House and The Other Passenger by Louise Candlish, and I've seen a bunch of people rave about Those People, so I really wanted to get to it. I'm trying to not buy any books though, so I looked on my local library site and saw it was available, so I put in a request for it. It arrived at my local library a couple of weeks later and Lee picked it up for me. It's so easy because it's already checked out to you - you just pick up the bag that's got your name on and go. Really simple! And I do like to support my local libraries because they're so important and because if we don't all use them, the Tories will shut them all down. 

So, like Candlish's other books, basically this one is full of terrible people and you want all of them to have terrible things happen to them. Most people in this book are posh and/or wealthy, and I like it when posh people don't succeed. Haha, sorry. I do love this kind of book.

All these people live on Lowlands Way, a street near Crystal Palace in London, and they are incredibly proud of that. At the bottom of the street are some lesser houses, but we don't have to care about them. At the top end are big Victorian villas, and people with a lot of money. But at the very top is two semi-deatched houses, built on the plot of a house bombed in the Blitz (although, why are they then numbers 1 and 3 if they only existed after WWII and all the other houses would have been previously numbered??? There's a plot hole!). Number 1 used to belong to an old lady named Jean, but she's died, and her nephew Darren has inherited the house. He moves in with his wife Jodie, and chaos starts to reign.

They are, no doubt, noisy neighbours. They do DIY at any time of the day, and they play loud metal music all night. They are also running a second hand car garage from the house, meaning they're taking up more than their fair share of parking spaces on the street. They make life hell for the house attached to them, which belongs to Ant and Em and their small baby, Sam. Sam can't sleep and Em is getting to the end of her tether. 

Everyone else in the street has problems with the newcomers too. Opposite, there's Sissy, who runs a bed and breakfast from her house, and who begins to get bad reviews because of the noise opposite. At numbers 5 and 7 there are brothers Finn and Ralph and their families. Finn is married to Tess, a stay at home mum, and she's desperate to move away from Finn's brother and wife, who she thinks have too much of an influence on Finn. The two families live next to each other and have a big shared garden. I'm not quite sure why this is relevant but they kept mentioning it. Tess gets delegated to by her sister in law a lot, and is often annoyed by her. 

Ralph and Naomi are kind of the A list couple on the street. Naomi runs some kind of thing like Mumsnet, and she's very posh and really annoying and thinks everyone is beneath her. Ralph (and Finn) came from working class origins but have managed to drag themselves up! Wow. And now Ralph owns a leather goods business in Bermondsey, and reckons he's the king of the world, to be honest. He's hotheaded and very irritating, and I so badly wanted him to get his comeuppance. 

The street is very proud of this thing they have called Play Out Sunday where they all move their cars off the street and close the road to traffic so that the children can play out in the street like in the olden days. Darren doesn't even KNOW about this initiative when everyone has a go at him for not moving his cards, but like fine, expect him to just know that this thing happen. (And also right, where did they all move their cars TO? Nearby streets, apparently - and how is that fair?! Or do only poor people live there, and therefore they don't matter????? Omg, this book)

Relationships between the residents and Darren and Jodie go very sour very fast. The police and council say they need documentation of what's happening, so Ant sets up a camera from his front window. But then tragedy occurs - as it was obviously going to - and everyone is a suspect. It's like Murder on the Orient Express, honestly. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had all been in on it. 

I really enjoyed Our House, and I liked The Other Passenger, but this book kind of annoyed me because everyone was just so snobby and snotty. I didn't get what Naomi's problem was, and it was never resolved. I didn't understand why almost anyone did what they did. I'm giving this three out of five. 

The Other Passenger by Louise Candlish - Review

I requested this on Netgalley and was kindly granted permission to read it by Simon & Schuster, so thank you to them. I was provided with an electronic copy of the book for review purposes, but was not otherwise compensated for this post. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed Our House by Candlish, so was eager to read something else by her. I liked the twists and turns so assumed this novel would be similar. There's a similarity in social class, which I kind of liked - I like reading about posh people getting into trouble.

So the book is about Jamie, who is forty-eight, and who lives with his partner Clare. She owns a very beautiful huge house in east London and is a partner in an estate agents. Jamie had a white collar job but after an incident of claustrophobia on the tube lost his job and took one in a cafe.

The book starts just after Christmas in 2019. Jamie is going to work and so gets on the river bus from his house into central London. As he disembarks, two policemen meet him. They tell him that his friend Kit has gone missing, and as he was the last person to see Kit on the 23rd of December, after a night out drinking, he is obviously an important part of their investigation. He goes with them for an informal chat in a cafe, and through flashbacks we get to know the whole story.

Clare's work had employed Melia just before the previous Christmas, and Clare invited Melia and Kit over for dinner in the January. They're both just about thirty and are working in jobs they seem to believe beneath them and are in lots of debt. Kit and Jamie decide to start getting the river bus together, and on there meet another guy, Steve, and a woman, Gretchen. Throughout the year, Jamie and Clare and Kit and Melia become friends, although there's always a tension between them. Kit in particular is jealous of Clare and Jamie's house, lives, wealth. He is spiralling into cocaine use and getting more and more into debt.

Jamie tells the police all he knows, and the beginning part of the story takes up half the book. I wasn't sure exactly where it would go then, but it raced through the second half. As I had read Our House, I was expecting some twists, and I did see some of them coming, but I also fell for a couple of red herrings, and some bits blindsided me totally. I did feel like there were some bits that stretched the realm of possibility, but I was willing to go with it because I liked the story so much. It's very deftly woven together, and almost no one comes out of it well.

I can't say I really liked Jamie, but I did sympathise with him. I didn't like Kit or Melia and found them irritating, which I think is part of the point. I wish we'd seen a bit more of Clare and understood a bit better what had kept her and Jamie together for ten years prior to the book. I do think Candlish is good at throwing bright light on bad parts of every human, and I like that.

I'm giving the book four out of five.

Our House by Louise Candlish - Review

I was in the mood to read a thriller kind of novel, with a bunch of twists and turns, so when I saw this advertised for 99p I bought it on Kindle. I was hooked by the premise - a woman turns into her street one day and finds another family moving into her house. They say that she, Mrs Lawson, has signed all the contracts, along with her husband, Bram. But Fi has done no such thing and is in a state of shock.

We get four strands of narrative: Fi, on the day that house is sold, Friday the 13th of January, Fi, a couple of months later, telling her version of events on a real crime podcast, Bram, on Friday the 13th after he's absconded, and Bram's suicide note, that he starts writing on that day too. We learn that Bram had sex with someone else the previous summer, so he and Fri split up but decided to do "bird's nest" custody, meaning they both stayed in the house with their children at times, but lived elsewhere at other times. This gave Bram access to the house, and we see how he came to sell it without Fi's involvement.

I had seen that there was a twist in the last part, which kept me guessing all the way through. I picked up some red herrings and some bits, but didn't quite see what was going to happen. I liked Fi and Bram too, although I thought they both acted like terrible humans in parts. I thought Fi was a bit too obsessed with the house - it's just bricks and mortar after all, although my house isn't worth two point two million dollars so what do I know. I thought the constant 'oh and here's something else terrible that happened' was a bit frustrating, but over all I did like the book and it kept me hooked, which is exactly what I was looking for. I am giving it eight out of ten and will look for something else by the same author.