Smorgasbord Fantasia

Cross Her Heart is the latest from Sarah Pinborough a taut psychological thriller with enough twists and turns to make your heart jump and keep you invested till the explosive climax. I am a big fan of her works - especially after the hauntingly evocative novella ' Language of dying ' and her stunning thriller ' Behind Her Eyes ' with that mind-blowing twist of an ending. So  Cross Her Heart  is sort of a spiritual sequel to Behind Her Eyes - with similar premise of an tangled up web of lies and deceit at the centre of it with an interesting experiment in the narrative that weaves between Now, Then and After. Truths be told, while yes I loved the book - I thought this was more a mainstream, straight forward psychological thriller examining the pedestrian life of a single mum, delving into the dysfunctional rut that defines her life which slowly devolves into unimaginable horrors when a secret from her past comes awake. It is minus the supernatural horrific el...

Sarah is fast becoming my go-to author for those twisted dark pretzel of a story that blurs the line between psychological thrillers and surreal fantasies. Of course, Behind Her Eyes was a runaway hit phenomenon last year after it came. A dark, real dark psychological thriller guaranteed to knock the socks off you with it's double-whammy twists that hits you at the end. The marketing materials came with specific instructions not to give away the mind blowing ending. And I agree that this definitely added to the hype and hoopla around the book making us intrigued, causing us to get to that end faster. I finished this in a week's time but I took my time purely because the premise and the story is really unsettling and caused me to stop several times and put this aside. So the story is about three characters in love. Yes - a doomed love-triangle involving a very successful psychiatrist, his rich and beautiful wife and his secretary in office, a single mum. So far so...

So I admit, Language of dying is the first book by Sarah Pinborough that I read. And by Gods, am I hooked. Language of dying by Sarah refuses to be pigeon-holed into a specific category of fiction - And by far, this one definitely is a literary knock-out punch. A gut-wrenching, soul-rending song of a book which attempts to unravel the something called the  language of dying - Yup it exists. How much ever we deny the same, this is a language defies definition or capture but is indeed something that all of us have had to deal with one time or the other. It is not just the fact that she chose to write about something as morbid and shocking as death. In fact, it is Sarah's treatment of the subject. Honest, unflinching and just plain brave. The story is that of a father wracked by lung cancer, lying painfully in his death bed while the nameless narrator, the daughter is waiting on him to die, a hauntingly disturbing vigil as this drama play out against the backdrop of grey m...