Review: The Night Visitor by Lucy Atkins

Something very sinister is afoot in this novel about an author and her research assistant ... and the ending very nearly blew me away. Olivia Sweetman is a historian, professor, TV star and a newly published author of a historical fiction novel that is tipped to hit the bestseller lists. Behind the scenes is her research assistant, Vivian, an intense and friendless woman who pounces on the project--and Olivia--with a little too much enthusiasm. As the novel shifts between narratives of the two women, it becomes increasingly clear that Vivian is far from well and that Olivia may be in serious danger.

2017 has been a great year for books and The Night Visitor is another title that I can proudly add to an already long list of my favourite new releases. I loved the gothic feel of this one--the duel settings of rural England and France add to the unsettling atmosphere. Olivia is an easy character to identify with, while Vivian is interesting to read about. At first, I wondered if she was simply lonely and treated badly, then I wondered if perhaps she was just a little bit intense and misunderstood and then I found myself wondering more and more about her motives and her relationship with Olivia. As I said, the ending nearly blew me away ... and that beetles deserves its place on the cover. (Whoever thought of it is a genius.)

Highly recommended.

I received my copy of The Night Visitor from Hachette Australia after winning a competition on twitter. Thank you!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more