Clare Littleford

Stephen Booth describes this as " ....one of the most subtly disturbing novels I've read in a long time" and I agree. Social worker Jo Elliott is attacked outside a shop in Nottingham and cannot describe her attacker to the police with any certainty but gradually she comes to believe that it was not a random attack. She believes that it had something to do with a case she worked on 8 years ago but both her friends and the police think she is losing her mind. Isolated and obsessed she sets out to find the truth but the truth is very dark indeed.
HIghly recommended.… (meer)

This book was a disappointment, and if it were not for the fact that I hate giving up on books, I probably would not have finished it.

Peter Williams sees a girl catch the same bus as him every morning, and whenever he sees her, she is scribbling in a notebook. One day, she disappears, leaving her notebook behind. Peter picks it up and starts reading, and slowly becomes obsessed with finding out what has happened to her...

Interesting premise maybe, but for me, the main problem was that Peter, the narrator, was neither believeable nor likeable. I imagine we were supposed to be following his descent into madness, but actually he just came across as self-absorbed and stupid. The chapters are interspersed with extracts from the girl - Sophie's - notebook/diary. And therein lies another problem. It takes Peter weeks to read the thing, whereas when we learn how much she had actually written, it becomes clear that he could have sat down with a cup of tea and read the whole thing in 20 minutes. Not only that, but if you were trying to find out where someone had disappeared to, and they had left behind some sort of diary, wouldn't you read the last entry first?!

All in all, I felt that this was an interesting idea for a book, but the execution and characterisation was poor.… (meer)