by John Boyne
First published 2024
Freya is a skin graft surgeon. She drives an expensive car, owns a flat in one of London's better postcodes, and answers to no one. From the outside, her life looks like a series of good decisions made by a capable woman. It was not always this way. Something happened when Freya was a child, during a single summer that bent the course of everything that followed. John Boyne moves between that past and Freya's polished present, letting the two timelines press against each other until the pressure becomes unbearable. The question the novel keeps asking is not a comfortable one. Did the events of that summer create the person Freya is now, including the coldness she carries and the ways she uses it? Or did she arrive in the world already wired for cruelty, with the summer merely giving it a direction? Boyne does not let the reader off the hook. He builds a psychological portrait that stays close to Freya's point of view, which means sitting inside a mind that is not always easy to occupy. The result is a novel about damage, about what we do with it, and about whether the two can ever really be separated.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, adult-fiction, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, introspective, psychologically-intense, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: dark-past, dual-timeline, unreliable-narrator
Setting: London
Period: Contemporary
176 pages · Hardcover · Doubleday
Content warnings: abuse, child-abuse