“I wonder about the weight of endings. Why should the way a person dies color the memory of their life? Or does the finality of death alone do it?”
“After my mother died a few years ago, peacefully but without resolution between us, the figure in my mind shifted from threatening to intermittently sympathetic.”

This was a good read. Read a good chunk of it at the beach which was lovely. Had me very entranced. The last half took a turn I didn’t expect but I appreciate it didn’t last too long.

Meggie is a complex and unreliable narrator which I always enjoy. She has such an idealized view of Sabine that it’s distorted. She really only knows what Sabine chooses to tell her regardless of the truth of any of it.

I appreciated how it spoke about the different experiences and intimacies with men and women. And how they are challenging in their own ways.

"I wanted to kiss her then, but recalled times with men when they'd converted an emotional moment into an opportunity for sex. How even when it was tender, I'd had this sense of rewarding their empathy, that they'd been hoping for the reward. It made me feel detached, slightly more alone. Not a big thing forgivable even. But I didn't want Sabine to feel like that. I didn't want her to feel alone at all."

i expected more of a thriller and it wasn’t at all. an interesting look at an unhealthy female friendship, but just not what i wanted to read

Randomly spotted this in Waterstones - cover drew me in, blurb intrigued me and then the first page sold me.

Persona and Mulholland Drive are two films I adore and this gave me a sense of those, so I had to pick it up. As I took it to the till, the guy shouted “Oh my god I know her!” and said he’d tell her I bought the book!

A really honest, youthful and frantic book exploring identity, obsession, loneliness and finding yourself. It paints a vivid picture of London in the late 90s, which feels and resonates to how I see London today.

I really connected with the Meggie in some ways, and she’s a great vessel for exploring with and dealing with my own feelings of being mid-ish 20s. A lot of the scenarios and situations she’s in are entirely different from my life, but it’s the reactions to them and the little moments between that really spoke to me.

I wasn’t sure if this was going to turn into something more surreal or stay grounded by the start (and the first 50 pages were a little repetitive and hard to connect to) but by the end it’s exactly what it needs to be and was always going to be.

The ending feels like a beginning for me. A continuation and a beginning that was only possible through the lack of an ending or conclusion of the past.

Meggie, at twenty-three, is at a crossroads in her life. Dissatisfied and bored with where the world has brought her, she longs to be free of the drudgery of her job and the expected course of the relationship with her boyfriend. Then, into her life walks the mysterious and sultry Sabine. Sabine is everything Meggie wishes she could be, and their unpredictable relationship quickly turns into obsession on Meggie's side.

When Meggie's fixation encourages her to follow Sabine into the underworld of the nightshift worker, the very process of working such unusual hours means letting go of everything she is used to. She becomes enmeshed in the chaos of life on the fringe that she and her fellow band of night workers inhabit, which gives her a feeling of camaraderie that she has never experienced before, and it also brings the permission to follow Sabine down other, more dangerous, paths - pushing her boundaries, and exploring her sexuality, in her quest to become someone else.

But their relationship is not an easy one. Meggie never really knows where she stands with Sabine, and their repeating cycle of intimacy and distance is disorienting to say the least. When Meggie's journey into the chaotic hedonism that is Sabine's reality takes a shocking turn, she begins to think differently about their friendship and look for a way to escape from the self-destructive path she is on. Taking stock, she begins to see that she doesn't really know anything about the woman who has taken hold of her every waking thought - and that others do not see her the way she does. Who is Sabine really?

This dark, absorbing and unsettling novel is told in a retrospective narrative by Meggie, as she reflects on her relationship with Sabine some twenty years before. As Meggie lays out the history of their twisted friendship you are pulled into a parallel world where normal boundaries and connections do not exist. Caught under the spell of Sabine, Meggie loses sight of her own identity and purpose - in this surreal world, this underworld, this space outside the daylight hours, she can be whoever she wants, and she wants to be Sabine... or does she simply want to be with Sabine? Whatever this is, it is not the path to happiness, and eventually she needs to free herself of the influence of Sabine before it is too late... but can she ever truly be free again?

Telling the tale in this way allows Kiare Ladner to expose the dark course that obsession and desire can take, but also allow the truth about Sabine and how meeting her has affected the direction of Meggie's life to be revealed after the event, which was rather clever - and it adds an air of poignancy to the whole story.

I absolutely loved this novel about identity, infatuation, loneliness and yearning for connection, even though it left me feeling rather sad. It's impressive work for a debut author, and cannot wait to read more from Kiare Ladner.

read if u like: speculative fiction abt 2 gay messes with anxious-avoidant attachment styles that do a lot of drugs and lie all the time about everything for no good goddamn reason!!!

A walk on the wild side… 5 stars

Meggie has come to live in London from her home in South Africa, largely to get away from her hypercritical mother. She has an office job which she finds dull, and a boyfriend, Graham, whom she loves, but she’s reluctant to settle for a long-term relationship – she feels as if she wants something more from life than marriage and children, but she isn’t sure what. Then one day Sabine comes to work in the office and Meggie finds herself immediately fascinated by this beautiful, enigmatic young woman. They form a tentative friendship, or so it seems to Meggie, and when Sabine decides to move to the nightshift, Meggie follows. Years later, she is looking back at this period of her life in the dying days of the last millennium, and telling the story of her obsession with Sabine…

Not much more than novella length, this short novel is a wonderfully believable depiction of a young woman who’s not yet sure who she is, nor of how to go about finding out. Meggie is undoubtedly obsessed with Sabine, but in a sense Sabine is merely the catalyst who forces Meggie to realise her dissatisfaction with her boringly normal life. Meggie can’t decide whether she wants to be Sabine’s lover – she’s never thought of herself as lesbian before, but she finds Sabine exciting. Or perhaps it’s that she wants to be Sabine – to be the woman whom other people see as exotic, mysterious and slightly dangerous. As she struggles to make sense of her own feelings and desires, Meggie experiments more and more with drink, drugs and casual sex, and finds herself taking risks that the old Meggie wouldn’t have considered.

This is Ladner’s début novel, and she has real talent. Her depiction is spot-on of club-going, hard-drinking, drug-fuelled youth from around the globe congregating in London in the late ’90s, forming friendships that have an immediate intimacy but no bedrock – young people who come to party, and party hard, far from the families who might provide a brake on the extremes of their behaviour, and find themselves in a city where everything is possible, or maybe nothing. Meggie’s quest to work out her sexuality, to make herself into someone new with her own place and identity in this shifting, impermanent community is beautifully done – an extreme example, admittedly, but recognisable as a part of life we all go through to a degree as we move into adulthood. In Meggie’s case, the whole thing is given a kind of hallucinatory edge, not only because of the drink and drugs, but because of the nocturnal life she is leading and the insomnia this brings on.

The writing is great and, apart from a brief dip about a third of the way through when it gets a little bogged down in repetition, the pace flows well. It becomes very dark towards the end, both harrowing and sad, but again both aspects are handled well and sensitively – Ladner avoids the sensationalism that could easily have made this feel too unpleasantly voyeuristic. Although it’s billed as being about obsession and desire, and certainly both those things are present, it’s really more of a dark coming-of-age tale, and an in-depth character study of Meggie written in her own words, with all the possible unreliability that entails. The ending shows Ladner’s skill at its best – it seems as if all the questions are answered and yet the feeling I am left with is of an enigma unsolved.

Dark and disturbing, it is nonetheless full of humanity and sympathy for human frailty. An excellent début – I recommend it highly and am keen to see where Ladner takes us next.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Picador via NetGalley.

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