Reader’s Digest UK – August 2019

BOOKS

Platform Seven by Louise Doughty

(Faber, £12.99)

Louise Doughty specialises in novels

that read like exciting thrillers—partly,

I suppose, because they are—but that

also delve deep into the mysterious

business of human relationships. Her

most famous, Apple Tree Yard, which

became a celebrated BBC drama,

featured a respectable, middle-aged

woman having a wildly ill-advised

affair. Now, in Platform Seven, she

again examines female self-deception

in the face of a charismatic but

dangerous man—as well as serving up

several generous subplots that between

them add up to a full-scale meditation

on what really matters in life.

Perhaps the most striking thing

about the narrator, Lisa, is that she’s

dead. At first, she’s not sure how she

ended up being killed by a

train at Peterborough

station, where she appears

to be spending the

afterlife. Gradually,

though, her memories

return—in a way that

reminds us how beautifully Doughty

can time a story: drip-feeding us the

information we need with tantalising

skill, while somehow making it feel

both shocking and utterly inevitable.

And just in case that’s not enough, the

book also contains one of the great

villains of recent fiction—not least

because his appeal to women is

so plausible.

The Nickel Boys by Colson

Whitehead (Fleet, £16.99)

In 2017 novelist Colson Whitehead

won a Pulitzer Prize for The

Underground Railroad, a brilliant and

ferocious depiction of slavery in the

American South.

The equally blistering The Nickel

Boys is set in Florida a century later—in

the early 1960s—but with the same

August Fiction

A seductive, twisty thriller that’ll keep you guessing

and a powerful lesson in the civil rights movement

are our top page-turners this month...

James Walton is a

book reviewer and

broadcaster, and has

written and presented

17 series of the BBC

Radio 4 literary quiz

The Write Stuff

122 • AUGUST 2019