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NOT ALONE

Name: NOT ALONE
Author: Sarah K. Jackson
ISBN: 9780385548434

by Sarah K. Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2023

The themes strain under too much emotional exposition.

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After a brutal climate apocalypse, a young mother undertakes an odyssey.

It's been five years since most of the Earth’s population was killed by a “plastic dust storm,” a disaster that threw microplastics from the oceans straight into human lungs. Katie survives in a suburb of London, foraging for berries and roots and trapping stray cats. Harry, her young son, has never left their apartment (Outside is alien enough to warrant a capital O). But Katie’s lungs are failing, and when she finds a hidden letter from the fiance she'd assumed to be dead, she takes Harry on a journey that will lead them to the northern reaches of Scotland. She hopes her fiance, a military veteran named Jack, can raise Harry after she, too, succumbs to the dust. Many of the survivors she meets along the way are menacing, and she struggles to trust even those who deserve it, like Andy and Sue, an older couple who have taken up together after losing their families in the storm. Leaving aside the plausibility of death by microplastics, many of Katie’s concerns seem contemporary. Characters wonder whether it's safe to leave their homes and lecture each other over wearing face masks. Katie’s struggle to be a good mother, especially in a catastrophe, is poignant. But Harry, until the novel’s final act, exists mostly to regurgitate Katie’s anxieties back at her. “Why didn’t you sleep with me?” he asks after an overnight foraging expedition. “What if I couldn’t wake up and I needed you?” Much of the novel is similarly overdetermined; a flashback to a precatastrophe self-defense class leads directly into a scene where Katie must put those skills to use. Jackson's debut novel is stronger when it's surprising, as in the scenes where Katie muses on the strange beauty of the new world.

The themes strain under too much emotional exposition.

Pub Date: May 2, 2023

ISBN: 9780385548434

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023

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SALTWATER

by Katy Hays ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2025

A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.

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On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.

When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.

A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.

Pub Date: March 25, 2025

ISBN: 9780593875551

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025

Categories:

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

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DISCLAIMER

by Renée Knight ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2015

An addictive psychological thriller.

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When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.

Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.

An addictive psychological thriller.