A Tidy Ending: The latest dark comedy from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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She has appeared on BBC Breakfast, BBC News Channel’s Meet the Author, interviewed on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5, and is a regular at literary festivals across the country including Edinburgh and Cheltenham. There’s a quirky element of this that reminded me a little of Nita Prose’s ’Molly’ in ’The Maid’, although story-wise this is very different in very many ways. But that seems fairly normal—until he starts keeping odd hours at work, at around the same time young women start to go missing. I really do like the sound of the British use of “settee’ instead of “couch” (it’s much prettier and flow-y on the tongue), but after a while, I’m telling you, settee can get old. Linda decides that the best way for her to have the lifestyle she wants is to track down Rebecca and emulate her.

The story centre around Linda who is living a very normal life with her husband Terry, that is until young women start to go missing in the neighbourhood.But, as we delve deeper and deeper into Linda’s psyche and the time gaps between Cannon’s alternating ‘Now’ and reflective narratives diminish, an intense concern and foreboding grows.

Early into this audiobook, I realised it was a thriller/suspense novel and was considering whether to finish it, as I want to take a break from the genre. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. This deliciously dark-ish, quirky story brilliantly comes together in a way that I never saw coming. There was a scene in the pub where she asks him a question and he seems to wonder if she’s even talking to him.Joanna Cannon’s second novel Three Things About Elsie is published in January 2018 and explores memory, friendship and old age. Two mysteries unfold simultaneously in the book: the identity of the serial killer, and the truth about Linda’s father. Cannon’s shrewd characterisation, sparky observations and subtly menacing plot makes this a darkly funny and delightfully sinister read. Terry says I’m forever misunderstanding the lyrics, but he doesn’t realize that there are always two ways to interpret everything in life. She flips through the glossy catalogs that arrive in the mail for the house’s previous tenant, Rebecca Finch, and imagines that woman’s glamorous lifestyle.

A compellingly crafted and compulsive read, full of twists—and twists on twists—that keeps you guessing until the last page. When another girl goes missing in the area in which she lives the whole neighbourhood gets caught up in the drama and a net of suspicion is cast. All the tiny details, all the quiet, unnoticed edges of the world have been taken away, and it’s only when they’re gone you realize how much you depended on them to make sense of everything else. Cannon has a talent for descriptive prose: “Mother has always been very good at spotting untruths and scooping them out of their shells, like whelks.The story is written in the first person perspective of Linda and comes from two timelines – Now' and what I suppose is 'Then'. Last year, a breakout debut novel hit the scene, and everyone fell in love with the character Molly in Nita Prose’s “The Maid”. At times it’s extremely funny, albeit darkly so, her way of speaking can be most amusing but she’s also very perceptive and clever so you try interpret the inflections and nuances to detect the truth.

I really enjoyed everything in this book, except how exaggerated the main character’s cluelessness was. Following a troubled childhood, when Linda and her mother left their old life in Wales, she has tried to reinvent herself. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘A masterclass in misdirection’: author Joanna Cannon at Oxford literary festival in March 2017. A Tidy Ending has a sinister tone from the very first sentence, and that drew me into the heart of the story.

Sharp, topical, and powerful, Hyper is a story about what remains of our humanity in a world increasingly dominated by the flows of capital. Mother says I take far too much notice of the world, that I hold on to things when everyone else has let them go, but it’s just the way God made me and you never know when that kind of information will come in useful. Meanwhile, Terry's behaviour is becoming increasingly erratic, and a series of vicious attacks on young women are keeping the town in a state of ghoulish agitation. There it waits, trapped in a silver frame, watching me live my life and pointing out all my mistakes.