Review: How To Kill Your Best Friend by Lexie Elliott

 What could have been the holiday of a lifetime quickly turns into a holiday from which to be rescued...

Georgie, Lissa, and Bronwyn - best friends since university - were inseparable, but Georgie and Lissa even more so. However, circumstances created distance between them all.

Lissa and her husband, Jem, opened a luxury resort on an island in South-East Asia. Georgie worked in New York, and Bron became a stay-at-home-mother after a successful career in accounting. 

All are summoned to this island when Lissa is pronounced dead after witnesses saw her go swimming, never to return. 

Business trickles slowly away, and suspicions arise amongst the remaining guests - all those who knew Lissa. Georgie is the first to air these suspicions, and once the can of worms is opened, nothing will ever be the same. 

The novel is well-paced, laced with adrenaline and red herrings, and utterly readable in one sitting. I wouldn't recommend reading well into the night - you'll start to jump everywhere you look - but it is a perfect combination of a beach read and thriller. 

Review: Here Be Icebergs, Katya Adaui (English translation by Rosalind Harvey)

 This brilliant Peruvian writer has distilled a plethora of different family and relationship dynamics into twelve short stories. 

They range from the ordinary (The Hunger Angel, with 68 distinct memories that coalesce into a stark picture of life from 2 to 68) to the fantastical (Where The Hunt Takes Place, in which a family are contending with a mysterious beast that attacks their house nightly). Some, like We, the Shipwrecked, read more like poetry than prose. 

Every reader will be able to identify with the sharp flashes of memory this collection of short stories invokes, from the most mundane and random, to memories or periods of time we would rather bury (such as This Is The Man). There is no neat ending, or order, per se, to these stories. They are like a series of vignettes that allow us to examine the fictional lives of others and see if they reflect our own experiences. 

Here Be Icebergs is publishes by Charco Press.