Chris Cleave’s novel steams along from the very first page until the end. It’s cutting, truthful, raw book that looks at the life of a woman who lost her son and husband in a terrorist attack on a football stadium in London. The book’s been in the media a lot because it was released, and all the marketing started, on the day of the London bombings.
Written in the first-person epistolary format, the narrator write a letter to Osama bin Laden about her life and her experiences pre- and post the attack. Her little boy was only 4 when he died, and her husband had the ironic job of being a bomb difuser with the London police.
It’s a poignant novel that I think has the potential to become a classic like 1984 or Farenheit 411, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to live through the vivid, destructive, and downright emotional scene she lives through—and there’s an urgency to the writing that remains with you long after it’s finished. All in all, an excellent.
I had written this post a while ago, and now that I’ve actually walked around parts of London, taken the tube, and seen a section of town where a major part of the book is actually set, it’s even more relevant. Or maybe just more relevant to me, to my own reading experience and my thoughts about tragedy, how people deal with the awful things that can happen out of the blue and the maudlin feelings that often crop up after one hasn’t had any sleep.