Gone Girl ~

Here's the book you have to read, if it's the only book you will read this year. A searing treatise on marriage in the guise of a thriller, Gone Girl is guaranteed to twist your brain - and make you feel guilty, along with the guilty pleasure of reading something totally unputdownable. 

A wife disappears. Everything points towards murder. The husband is the prime suspect. And that's just the beginning. Things unfold from the perspectives of both of them. And you can't believe anything in this insane story. 

The book's ingenuity doesn't only lie in it's mad twist, it's cutting humor or it's uncanny unpredictability, but in it's plunge into the darkness of what marriages can become. It's written with feeling, and documents with searing insight into how relationships reach their acmes, before they start to plunge. 

The elation of the first flush of love, the early ethereality of marriage, the feeling that nothing can go wrong with love and life, slowly melting into realizations of how we all carry the baggage of our pasts, our proclivities, our blood, into every relationship - and how that puts everything into a spin, and often gets us to act in ways totally out of our own control. 

Outstanding prose delves, cuts, and reveals what makes us fall in love, the expectations, the exploration -  and then the disintegration and the disillusionment of truths which burden us more than lies. 

And then the book talks about truths - about how lies are truths and truths are lies, if only you know how to view them. As the book spins it's tale, we realize we can't believe anything or anyone, and even as things become extreme, the stark truth of what our needs make us do, sinks in. As also the realization that whilst we are often victims, we very often make ourselves our own victims. 

Cautionary tale for the married? A forewarning for the about-to-be married? Relief for the unmarried? However you see it, you will want to plunge back into this terrifically written book the moment you finish reading it.