Focusing on drama and emotions

This week’s bookcase includes reviews of Fiona Barton’s second thriller, The Child, The Lying Game by Ruth Ware and Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

THE CHILD

The second novel from Fiona Barton – author of bestselling The Widow – tells another psychologically thrilling story. Journalist Kate Waters is back and this time investigating the decades-old skeleton of a baby found on an east London building site.

In an effort to land an exclusive story, Kate is determined to find out who buried the baby and if it’s Alice Irving, a newborn stolen from a local maternity hospital in the 1970s.

The pace of Kate’s investigation is matched by the unravelling story of

Emma Massingham, who is struggling to come to terms with her own past.

The main character Kate’s tenacity to uncover the truth is the driving force behind the plot. Every couple of chapters, Barton kicks the novel’s suspense into a new gear, and you won’t be able to put it down until all the secrets have been shared.

THE LYING GAME

A dark secret from a longforgotten summer gnaws at the heart of this impressive new novel from Ruth Ware.

Her style is assured in this pacy coming-of-age tale, hanging on the secrets and lies that bind four friends, Isa, Kate, Thea and Fatima, together into adult life.

Returning to their old boarding school, Isa, now a young mother, is tormented by her hazy and unreliable memories of the weeks surrounding the disappearance of Kate’s father 17 years ago, and the consequences of the so-called Lying Game the girls had loved to play.

The dreamy narrative leaps from present to past as the horror and guilt are slowly peeled away before reaching a dramatic close.

What could have been a well-trodden idea becomes gripping and urgent in Ware’s capable hands. A THOUSAND PAPER BIRDS

Tor Udall’s first novel is a poetic exploration of those most difficult of topics, grief and love, against the backdrop of Kew Gardens.

Widowed Jonah wanders through the gardens, trying to come to terms with the loss of his wife, Audrey, and the reasons for her death.

There he meets Chloe, an artist who sketches the gardens and finds solace from unspoken pain in origami. Also in the gardens are Harry, an elderly gardener, and

Milly, a child who seems to belong nowhere else.

Udall leads the reader through the tangled web of relationships binding each of these four people to Audrey. What emerges is a strange and unexpected story of death and its aftermath that lingers in the mind. WEDDING TOASTS I’LL NEVER GIVE

As the title of American author and columnist Ada Calhoun’s new book of essays, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give suggests, it’s unlikely you’ll hear any speeches quite like these at forthcoming nuptials.

Wincingly honest, there’s no place for soulmates and declarations of togetherness. Instead, there’s resentment for missing flights, breaking bathroom taps and, more upsettingly, finding other people attractive

– and coming clean about it.

By and large, Calhoun is supportive of love and those who seek it out. Hopeful, sensible and grounded in reality, it serves just as much guidance to those in long-term relationships to those embarking on them.