Richard Crewdson knew very little about his aunt Dorothea until he discovered her extraordinary diaries, which relate, in vivid detail, her experiences of nursing near the front line during the First World War. Here, he tells us about finding the diaries and visiting some of the beautiful locations Dorothea describes and illustrates in them. 

I had been too busy to clear out my father’s desk, which I inherited after he died, when a letter arrived from the Imperial War Museum. The museum had agreed with my father that his sister’s First World War diaries should be deposited there after his death. I knew very little about my aunt Dorothea, except that she had served as a VAD nurse and died while stationed in France in 1919. My father, though eleven years younger than her, had been close to his sister, but he rarely spoke about her.

A quick look at the seven little notebooks wedged into pigeonholes in my father’s desk left me in no doubt that here was a book in the making. So I replied to the Imperial War Museum to say that of course they could have them, but I would like to use them for a book first, to which they kindly agreed.

Some of the illustrations from Dorothea’s diaries

When I finally got down to transcribing the diaries I ended up with a first draft of 190,000 words. With a few regrets but without making any major cuts I was able to reduce it by a third. The important thing was to retain all the wonderful drawings Dorothea had fitted on to the pages, and not to sacrifice the remarkable way in which she included some original comment or description in every diary entry. I also wanted to let her glorious sense of humour shine through. When I was growing up I was very fortunate to know her five Scottish first cousins, all of whom had great energy and a sense of fun. I felt sure, as I got to know her through the diaries, that Dorothea must have been very like them.

Watch the video to see Dorothea’s original diaries

Of the three hospitals where Dorothea worked it is fairly obvious from the diaries that she enjoyed the first (No. 16 at Le Tréport) the most, and the last (No. 46 at Étaples) the least. The more I studied the diaries the more I felt it was essential to visit the sites and ‘smell the air’ at each, so we arranged a brief family excursion last autumn to do the rounds. This was a fascinating and exciting exercise, and what was perhaps least expected (despite the happy accounts of ‘days off’ in the diaries) was the sheer beauty of this part of France, which remains utterly unspoilt by tourism. I hope Dorothea’s book will do nothing to change this!

Dorothea’s original sketch of the hospital location, and a photograph of the spot today

Le Tréport, in particular, is truly spectacular, with some of the highest cliffs in France rising straight up behind the little fishing port (which itself is a charming little town with a bustling covered fish market on the pier, where anyone can buy almost any fish imaginable).

Mesnilval cliffs

The site of the great hotel, which became No. 3 General Hospital in the first months of the war, and alongside which No. 16 Hospital was developed in tents and then huts, is clearly identifiable at the top of the funicular railway that still tunnels its way through the cliffs. The views from the cliff-top are quite stunning, and the area is known as the ‘opal coast’ because of the colour of the sea. There are now housing estates on the cliff-top, but they have been built well back from the edge, unlike the tents of No. 16!

The Opal Sea

Wimereux, is now almost a suburb of Boulogne and an attractive seaside resort, probably not much bigger than it was a century ago. The military hospital area lay just to the north of the town, and gradually covered the whole of the golf course, which is once again in full use. The hotel that had been the main building of No. 32 Hospital has gone, almost without trace, but the Golf Club building that served as the Officers’ Mess still stands. There are a few traces of the light railway line that created a bit of a hazard for the nurses. The view across the Channel of the ‘White Cliffs’ on a fine day, which made Dorothea so homesick, is just as it always was. The viewpoint for the ‘panorama’ looking towards Boulogne which she drew in her diary, with its landmarks and ‘key’, can be identified after a little search (the coast-line has been eroded a bit).

Finally Étaples – Dorothea’s third and least favoured posting – is really best avoided. There are no First World War landmarks to see and it has been heavily developed. Even the war museum has recently closed down. It is now hard to visualise this little town as having been one of the British Army’s principal base camps and it really had or has no attractions (then or now). For pleasure and good food one should make one’s way directly to Le Touquet (Paris-Plage), nearby; for a pilgrimage the vast Imperial War Graves Commission Cemetery with its Lutyens towers is situated about 5 kilometres north of Étaples, but this was not the cemetery which was in use during the war, and it must be said that it is very bleak and uninformative. When we were there it was completely deserted – no staff, no ‘Information Centre’ or museum (quite different from Tyne Cot at Ypres), and it was pouring with rain! But Dorothea’s grave is there among the medical officers and other nursing staff.

Even if one does no more than cast a glance at Étaples, a visit to the three hospital locations helps to put the diaries, and the experiences of countless nurses like Dorothea into three dimensions. And the joy of driving on excellent French roads with minimal traffic is an experience in itself, especially if you are on the way from one good restaurant to another!

Dorothea’s War: The Diaries of a First World War Nurse, edited by Richard Crewdson, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 13 June 2013 in hardback and ebook.

Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree, a novel set against the backdrop of two Iranian revolutions, separated by 25 years. In her guest blog she tells us what inspired her to write about these events and how her own family’s experiences influenced the story. 

The subject of Children of the Jacaranda Tree did not come to me as easily and automatically as I wish it had. The idea of it took shape over the years, and not until the penultimate chapter did I know what I wanted to do with it.

It all started in October 2006 when my husband and I arrived in Melbourne, Australia, to spend my husband’s sabbatical year there. I had just finished a third novel that deep down I knew was no good, and was anxiously reflecting on why I had never truly been taken with the stories that I wrote. The answer came, slowly and painstakingly, but it did finally come: I had to begin writing my own stories, the stories of my family, the untold stories of the Revolution in Iran.

The first short story that I wrote – later on one of the chapters of the novel – was the story of the bracelet of date stones my father made in prison. I submitted this story to Perigee Publications. In December 2006, it was accepted; I had just published my first story. Encouraged, I wrote another short story and another. Gradually I realised that, directly and indirectly, every time I wrote, I kept going back to the same theme, to the same event that not only altered the course of history in Iran but also changed the life of my family for ever.

Watch a video of Sahar discussing the true stories that influenced her writing.

In the last year of the Iran–Iraq war, around 4,000 to 12,000 political prisoners were executed and buried in mass graves. The exact number has never been known. My uncle was one of those executed. My parents too had been incarcerated, due to their political activism, however, they were lucky to have served their prison sentence and been released just a few years earlier. Children of the Jacaranda Tree is an attempt not only to keep alive the memory of my uncle and all those who were murdered in that blood-soaked summer, but also to shed light on this dark moment in Iranian history, on its tales of violence, prison and death, which have remained untold for so long. To give voice not only to the victims of this atrocity but also to the ordeal of their families and their children, who have had to live with their unspoken grief buried inside them year after year, decade after decade.

Read an extract from Children of the Jacaranda Tree

Children of the Jacaranda Tree is out now in hardback and eBook

This intrigues me. A couple of years back, Ian McEwan was mourning the paucity of authors tackling the topic, fresh from his own publication of Solar (set around the topic of environmental disaster). “I have been surprised there aren’t more novels [about it]. It’s clearly begun to have an impact on our lives already and it has huge human consequences, on a small scale, on a private level and on a geopolitical level,” he said at the time - although he did admit the difficulty in tackling the subject. “There’s physics, statistics, graphs, data – and you’ve got to make it interesting,” he said. “Novels don’t work if you badger people, which is partly why I have the comic frame [in Solar].”

Today, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, about how climate change affects a farming community in the Appalachians, is leading the charge of new “cli-fi” writing. She faced the same issues as McEwan, telling Heritage.com that she “was going to have to teach people some basic physics, some basic biology, some population genetics, the difference between causation and correlation”, but that she “didn’t want to hoodwink my readers, I didn’t want to say ‘I’ll tell you a good tale and I’ll incidentally teach you some physics.’ What I had to do was invite my readers to learn some things they maybe didn’t know they needed to know, and to do it seamlessly, to invest this story with enough science so that the readers could understand what is going on.”

It’s a tricky path to steer, but by all accounts Kingsolver pulls it off – I’m looking forward to Flight Behaviour, and also to Tony White’s intriguing-sounding Shackleton’s Man Goes South, inspired by a residency at the Science Museum, and based on scraps of an early 20th-century story which was one of the first to ever mention climate change. White’s story “flips” the Shackleton narrative, and makes it a desperate escape to Antarctica in a hot world…sounds amazing.

Other “cli-fi” novels I’ve enjoyed over the years include Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate change trilogy, Stephen Baxter’s Flood – which closes as the seas lap over the top of Everest, an astonishing image, and – of course – JG Ballard’s The Drowned World. I’d love to hear other suggestions – I might not like the sound of it, but it looks as though “cli-fi” is here to stay.

I arrived to see The Great Gatsby in a bit of state, stressed and shaken from a horrific drive on account of a road closure, a satnav with the inability to maintain a GPS signal and misleading diversions. I felt extremely aware of my 21st century life, with its ugly, characterless cars and hopeless economic situation. But on finding my seat, I was immediately thrown into a 1920’s blur of colour and sound, sucked straight into Baz Luhrmann’s vivid interpretation of a beloved and classic novel; The Great Gatsby.

Everything in Luhrmann’s version is extravagant and excessive, from the exquisite jewelled dresses to the over polished cars in an electric array of colours. With looser morals, bootlegged liquor and the echo of jazz reverberating across a hazy New York, Luhrmann artistically depicts the economic swelling of the roaring twenties.

The way in which the film is shot is phenomenal, the camera angles and saturated colour breathe new life into Fitzgerald’s defining novel. It is punchy, fast paced and flashy; each shot pristine and crisp. It is a feast for the eyes, a no-expenses-spared spectacle and a mesmerising show. And as Jordon Baker, (played by the enchanting Elizabeth Debicki) utters the words ‘It takes your breath away, doesn’t it?’ I couldn’t help but nod in agreement, because it does. And isn’t that what entertainment should do? Surely, that’s what cinema is all about?

In fact, The Great Gatsby is the first film I have seen for a long time during which the audience remained completely silent. There was no rustling of popcorn, no slurping of jumbo sized drinks and there was certainly no talking whatsoever. We were all absorbed and hypnotised by the gorgeous extravaganza before our eyes. Finding ourselves enveloped in an enchanting, layered world, traversing amongst ‘…the whisperings and the champagne and the stars’. The brightest star of them all, being Gatsby. Leonardo Dicaprio’s performance was stunning. His ability to combine Gatsby’s sweet, almost childlike, fear of rejection, with his delusional hope and desire to prove himself worthy of the girl with the ‘…voice full of money’, was outstanding. He captured the very spirit of Gatsby wonderfully, knee deep in corruption but charming and unassuming nonetheless; the American dream gone awry. And this emotional execution made the tragedy of the popular story all the more tragic.

Carey Mulligan’s performance was exquisite and with her soft tone and doe eyes it is easy to see why she was an obvious choice for the role of Daisy. Mulligan plays the conflicted female brilliantly, obviously torn between an age-old and newly-made wealth, unable to reject her present comforts with the brutish Tom for a retreat back into the past with a man she loved five long years ago.

Luhrmann uses Nick Carraway in the same way Fitzgerald does, as a literary device through which the story so effortlessly unfolds, providing the film with a tight textual focus. The words of the novel appear on the screen at various points, adding another dimension to the immortal words of Fitzgerald; especially when seen in 3D. It is an incredibly layered novel and Luhrmann has created a layered cinematic prose to reflect this; using modern techniques to build an onscreen depth that originally only the novel could convey.
However, Tobey Maguire’s performance was mediocre. He was not the Nick Carraway I envisioned. He was too jovial for my liking and simultaneously awkward; seeming bewildered for the duration of the film when I imagined him to be a much stronger character. This role would have been the making of some unknown actor; it could have been the break Leonardo got in Romeo and Juliet. But instead Nick Carraway is slightly tarnished by visions of Spiderman. Admittedly, Maguire was endearing at some points, the elements of humour he brought to the screen his one redeeming quality.

Despite the visual decadence and the unfathomable costume budget, The Great Gatsby is perhaps most beautiful and poignant when the parties are packed away, when the ‘pyramid of pulpless halves’ are stacked up by Gatsby’s door. It is in these quiet scenes that the haunting sadness and yearning behind the lavish bravado is clear to see. The effects are abandoned in the heated Hotel room scene, the opulence left in the lobby. No brassy music or glitter cannons are needed, just a great deal of tension and five actors simply acting. The result is immensely effective, as Fitzgerald’s writing is given the undivided attention it deserves in the most pivotal scene. And Luhrmann’s ingenious addition of Gatsby’s explosive anger reveals him to be quite human underneath that cool pink suit.

Luhrmann is an outstanding director and he has done for The Great Gatsby what he did for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. He has captured the essence of the book with his quirky cinematography, drawing on the grandeur of the period, using the original text as the script and setting this intriguing and heart-breaking story of expectation, against an eclectic and edgy musical backdrop. The soundtrack is incredible, enriching the story in an astonishing way. The frenetic scenes and iconic sounds of Jay-Z, Lana Del Ray, Florence + The Machine, will.i.am, Gotye, The xx and Emile Sande (to name a few), complement each other creating the illusion of an illicit underground speakeasy. Luhrmann, with his ear for music injects a haunting and memorable soundtrack, making the film a multi-sensory experience with its dangerous, exciting and glamorous vibe, putting a modern spin on Fitzgerald’s jazz age.
I cannot fault this brilliant adaption of a timeless novel. It is without doubt the best film I have seen this year. In fact I’m half tempted to go and see it again this weekend but purchasing the incredible soundtrack and watching the trailer on repeat will have to suffice until then!

There are eight titles in total – also All the Beggars Riding by Lucy Caldwell, Black Bread White Beer by Niven Govinden, The Village by Nikita Lalwani, The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon, and Secrecy by Rupert Thomson. And Louise Doughty, chair of the judges selecting the titles, gives them a good write-up. “The eight books we eventually selected range from compelling historical mysteries by Rupert Thomson and Nell Leyshon through contemporary dramas of humour and power by James Meek, Anthony Cartwright, Nikita Lalwani and Niven Govinden to books by Lucy Caldwell and Amy Sackville that challenge the very nature of storytelling,” she says. “What all these eight authors share is the ability to create a unique voice for their own gripping narrative – each novel here is compulsive in its own individual way and there really is something for everyone on this list.”

I’ve only read the Cartwright, the Meek and the Sackville. I loved all of them, so that bodes well for the remaining five; I’ll definitely be giving them a try.

The organisers of the Fiction Uncovered promotion – it came about following discussions between the Arts Council England and book professionals to find a way of celebrating British novelists who had already published at least one novel – will be hoping others feel the same way. With support from retailers including Foyles, Kobo, iBookstore, Amazon, Waterstones and independent bookshops, they’re certainly doing their best to make sure readers know about these authors.

I like the promotion precisely because of its focus on those authors who have already got a few books under their belt. We all hear about the amazing debuts, the huge first-time advances, in the press, but how about the authors who have been honing their craft for years, who have got better and better with each novel – they deserve a bit of shelf room and celebrating too, surely? Hilary Mantel, after all, has had a 28-year career, and has published 13 books – but it wasn’t until 2009’s Wolf Hall that she became a household name.

Winning the prestigious David Cohen prize earlier this year, she said “There are some readers who think that I was born on the day Wolf Hall was published. This prize acknowledges that there are no overnight sensations in the creative arts. That’s not the way it works. The ground has to be prepared and I feel that this is recognition of the fact that for many many years I’ve been trying to perfect my craft.”

Indeed. And good for Fiction Uncovered for giving readers some more fantastic writing to discover, just in time for the summer holidays.
Any other names you’d add to the list?

Full terms and conditions can be found here. This competition closes on 31st May 2013.

Before I began researching North Korea for my book, All Woman and Springtime, I had little idea of the bizarre personality cult that centered around the country’s founder or the crazy propaganda machine which spins fantastical tales that at times seem like a hack mash-up of ancient mythologies and the grimmest of Orwellian prognostications. Below are some of the strange and sometimes harrowing facts I encountered while researching my novel.

Though Kim Il-sung’s rise to power is still within living memory for some, the mythology of his, his son’s and grandson’s power paints them as god-like.  For example, Kim Jong-il’s birth, according to state media, was heralded by the natural world with rainbows, the sudden arrival of spring in full bloom and a new, brilliant star lighting the sky.

The Kims are portrayed as being infinitely compassionate to the people of North Korea, in spite of overseeing a vast network of forced labor political prisons.  They are also known to possess uncanny wisdom, giving ‘on the spot guidance’ where they routinely dispense knowledge surpassing that of experts in any field.  After such a visit, the factory or farm in question invariably enjoys a quantum leap in productivity, attributable only to the Kim benediction.  Both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are credited with writing thousands of books, operas and treatises, putting the most productive of mere mortals to shame.  Kim Jong-il apparently had great beginner’s luck, bowling a perfect game on his first try, and scoring multiple holes-in-one the first time he held a golf club.

The people of North Korea love their leaders so much that their photographs are displayed prominently in every home.  The photographs are standard issue, and come complete with a kit and instructions for their care.  The failure to express one’s love for the leadership in this way, or even failure to properly maintain the photographs, could be enough to land three generations of a family in a forced labor camp.

In the mid-1990s North Korea began suffering a famine which killed between one and four million people.  Political isolation made the problem worse, and then rampant corruption subverted international humanitarian aid.  Even so, the state propaganda maintained that North Korea was the most prosperous of nations, the envy of all the world.  The shortage of food was at one time explained as an effort by Kim Jong-il to stockpile food for their poor, starving neighbors in South Korea.  Food shortages continue today.  As a result of the famine, the average North Korean stands several inches shorter than his South Korean counterpart, and lags considerably in other areas of development.

At one time Kim Jong-il was the world’s largest consumer of Hennessey cognac, spending three-quarters of a million US dollars a year on the beverage.  He also had a penchant for fine French wine, and was known to have fresh lobster airlifted to him on his own personal luxury train.  This type of behavior is perhaps not uncommon for world leaders, but the poverty in which the average North Korean lives makes the Kim family gluttony stand out in stark contrast.

Kim Il-sung was named ‘Eternal President’ in the North Korean constitution in 1998, four years after his death, making sure no one else could bear the title of president.  The official name for North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, often shortened to DPRK.  It’s an interesting name for a country where the leaders are neither voted in nor given term limits.

State radio is piped into every home in North Korea.  The state-provided radios are equipped with volume control dials which cannot completely mute the broadcast, and have no off switch.  All televisions and radios are modified so that they can only pick up North Korean channels, and there are random inspections to make sure they have not been re-modified for broader reception.  Possessing a full spectrum unit could land three generations of a family in a forced labor camp.

Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, is home to only the most elite and proven faithful of North Koreans.  Lesser citizens are confined to the outskirts, with the least desirable, or higher risk citizens occupying depressed nether regions.  People with disabilities are not allowed in the capital because it would taint the image of superiority that the showcase city attempts to convey.  It is even said that adults under a certain height are not allowed in the city.  Perhaps that was why Kim Jong-il wore platform shoes.

North Korea is home to the world’s fifth largest army, and considers itself in a constant state of war with South Korea and the United States.  The tension in the Korean peninsula is serious—the Pentagon estimates that if full scale war were to break out between the Koreas, 1 million people would die within the first day or days.

Kim Jong-il, himself a director of films, had two prominent South Korean filmmakers kidnapped for the purpose of establishing an internationally recognized North Korean film industry.  The captives were able to escape eight years later and debunk the official North Korean story that they had purposefully defected to North Korea.  There are also numerous stories of civilian kidnappings from Japan and the northern border of South Korea.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of strange North Korea facts.  The ability of North Korea to function has largely been reliant on absolute state control of information within its borders.  When I began my research just a few short years ago, only around twenty-five percent of the population had ever encountered foreign media.  Because of an increasingly porous border with China, and with the inevitable march of the digital age—SIM cards, thumb drives and the proliferation of DVDs and small media players, and even illegal cell phones—most North Koreans have now had at least some brief exposure to foreign media. When we consider the recent saber rattling of North Korea in this context, it is easy to imagine that perhaps it is a last-ditch effort to maintain control of its population, which must be getting wise to the disparity between what it is told and the truth of the rest of the world.  Though North Korea has survived well beyond what most forecasts have predicted, it will have to find some way to adapt to the information age, or go the way of other Stalinist dodos.  I only hope its death knell resounds with peace.

All Woman and Springtime is out now in paperback and eBook

Abigail Tarttelin, author of 

The summer before I wrote Golden Boy, I was thinking a lot about gender. How does it affect us? How do other people treat us differently because of it? How does our experience as a certain gender shape us? For example, in general women are smaller and physically weaker than men – might years of living with this vulnerability make us more cautious?

There were several factors in my life that made gender a theme at that time. Like many writers I am inspired by reading, and that summer I read The Women’s Room by Marilyn French in a quiet park opposite my flat in Camden Town. It was also a bit of a summer of love, and I was thinking about the roles men and women traditionally play in relationships. I also grew up being friends with a lot of guys and was experiencing surprise at that time, in realising that there were differences between us, caused by something as arbitrary as the chromosome combinations we were born with. Gradually these themes developed, and sometime in late September I started to write an email, sending it back and forth to myself, about two brothers, one of whom was not quite, or only, a teenage boy.

A big fan of Spanish language cinema like the films of Pedro Almodovar, in 2009 I had taken myself to see an Argentinian film called XXY, about an intersex teenager living in a remote coastal village. Three years later, I wondered if a discussion on the different experiences of the two ‘accepted’ genders could be approached with a narrative about an intersex individual. I wondered how someone who had grown up as a male might cope with finding that, due to the capabilities of their body, they must deal with an important and often frightening part of the female experience.

How would my lovely protagonist, who I now named Max, cope with his body’s insistence on exposing his secrets? Would his family treat him differently? Would he have the courage to live in an undefined role in society, or would he seek definition out?

When it came to writing Golden Boy, I realized that many depictions of LGBTQIA individuals in contemporary culture show them living on the periphery of society. I questioned why this was, as intersex and trans individuals can be born to anyone, anywhere, and the matter of gender impacts on most people’s lives at some point or another. It became very important to me that Max live within an ‘average’ family and community, so that Golden Boy had the best chance of reaching, and speaking to, Mums, Dads and adolescents everywhere.

Later, after I had written the first draft, I became aware of a new generation of bloggers and subculture internet icons subverting old ideas of gender identity. Their identity was informed by gender, but by alternative genders or nonconformist attitudes to their own gender, that they had chosen. These bloggers were as young as 14, and they weren’t afraid. They were out, proud and completely self-confident; at the pinnacle of a progressive, worldwide movement towards embracing the idea that identity and gender are things we have to take into our own hands and not absolute concepts we are born with.

The example these young people offered proved that characters like Max and Sylvie were wanted and perhaps needed in literature and mainstream culture. At the same time, press coverage like the front page articles on trans children in New York Magazine and The New York Times in 2012, made me ever more confident that a novel like Golden Boy could contribute to a discussion on gender by making the subject accessible; addressing families and readers, and not solely those already at the forefront of progressive thinking about gender and sexuality.

Culture tends to lead the way for society as a whole to progress, and we are undoubtedly seeing a more fluid vision of male and female emerging in contemporary art, writing and fashion. With publishers willing to go wild over books like Golden Boy; the hiring of women like Tilda Swinton and Casey Legler to model menswear fashions; Sweden’s argument over the sexless pronoun; ample magazine coverage and TV shows like Hit Or Miss, in what could be the biggest cultural and social phenomenon since the sixties, everything seems to be pointing towards a freer idea of she and he.

Click here to meet Max and read the first section of Golden Boy

Take a look at our Reading Group discussion points

Watch Abigail reading an extract from Golden Boy

Golden Boy is out now in hardback and eBook

The Group

Our book group was formed over discussions at the infant school gates. Ten years on, the children who were being walked to school are now about to sit their GCSEs!  Some 120 books later the group is still going strong. There are 14 of us and we meet once a month taking it in turn to host.  Despite the fact that there is always plenty of delicious food and copious amounts of wine , the group is surprisingly disciplined. We allow ourselves an hour to catch up and trade news but then the conversation is very much about the book. We have a chair, who will do a bit of background research and prepare some questions to help shape the discussion. However, their main task is to try and maintain order as we are group with strong opinions and everyone is keen to have their say.  We always score the book and write a short synopsis of the views expressed.  After that we all collapse and eat cake.

The Book

Gone Girl follows the disappearance of Amy Dunne, the beautiful and intelligent wife of Nick. The couple have just left New York and moved back to Nick’s recession- hit home town in Missouri. A picture of marital disharmony soon becomes evident. Having lost their jobs as fashionable magazine journalists, they are now living a dull and boring life in suburbia surviving on Amys trust fund.  She decides to lend Nick the money to buy a bar but then, on their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears. As the police investigation and media spotlight falls on Nick dark secrets begin to emerge. From this point the book becomes a real page turner as the reader begins to realise that we have been provided with not one, but two unreliable narrators. It becomes clear that both Nick and Amy have omitted or lied about the information they have given. Their stories do not add up but who is telling the truth is impossible to gauge.  This device gives the book the layers of suspense and tension needed in any good thriller.

We all enjoyed the book and it provoked a great discussion. Everyone agreed it was a clever idea that, on the whole, was very well executed.   Many of us thought it was brave but risky to write a book where the two main characters were so unlikeable. Some of us felt that the plot became implausible at times.  Overall we scored it 3.5 out of 5.

Our thoughts

I started this book without any knowledge of the hype that surrounds it. The expectations of the fledging relationship kept me interested at first and I was keen to see how it would develop but then wham! Half way in and things change and I was totally gripped.  Maria Barnes

I enjoyed the swing of the moral compass as you discovered more about the different characters. However, I felt the ending was flawed and didn’t live up to the cleverness of the plot.  Abby Stokes

The skill with which Flynn uses the two converging first person narratives to peel back the layers of the story made for a compelling read, and ramped up the mystery really successfully.  I enjoyed the way that she played with our changing perceptions of Nick and Amy to suggest that we can never know fully what is going on in someone else’s marriage, or indeed your own. Jane Prentice

I just wish it had been more thrilling but I didn’t care about the characters to worry who was going to hurt who. The idea was fabulous but I would have enjoyed it more had it been more subtle and if I’d warmed to at least one of the key characters.  Rachel Lannon

The author raises a lot of interesting questions about modern relationships. Both Nick and Amy feel under pressure to fulfil certain roles and live up to stereotypes of perfection driven by our media dominated world. These expectations are impossible to live up to and Gillian Flynn explores with relish the dark and devastating consequences of a man and a woman in a modern marriage pretending to be what they are not.  Sally Anderson

Reading this made me rather concerned for the mental wellbeing of the author. Her world view is so cynical and jaded…are we really like this? Intriguing, frustrating, compelling but ultimately a depressing book.  Audrey MacMillan

What I thought was fascinating was the way the book examined the relationship between husband and wife, and the different roles played by women at different stages of a relationship. I could really relate to the “cool girl” persona and I am sure many women, especially early in a relationship, feel desperately the pressure of not conforming to a stereotype of a nagging or demanding “high maintenance” girlfriend.  Although exaggerated, I also thought the author’s examination of a woman feeling the need to be in control was very interesting.  So the book succeeded on many levels for me. Gemma Pearce

The book had flashes of crystal clear, really well observed scenes depicting the painful breakdown of a marital relationship. However the fact that the main protagonists were ‘Punch and Judy’ style stereotypes meant that ultimately I had no sympathy for either of them.  Amir Aujla -Jones

Dark Eden is the sort of book which should tempt people who wouldn’t describe themselves as science fiction readers to give the genre a try. Beckett himself – he’s a part-time lecturer in social work as well as an author – provides a “special message to people who don’t read SF” on his website, and it’s worth a look.

“It frustrates the hell out of me that 90% of the reading public will probably never even touch [my books], simply because of the SF label they carry,” writes Beckett. Some SF, he says, is “strong on phallic machines and enormous explosions, and weak on character, relevance and emotional subtlety”, but the conventions of the genre are also “powerful tools for writing and thinking about human life and about the world we actually inhabit”. And anyway, if you read fiction at all, “you must already be okay with the idea that sometimes making things up is helpful”.

Beckett points to China Miéville and George Orwell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Doris Lessing, to make his point, asking readers to “judge a book by its depth, its breadth, its relevance to your life, its originality, its execution”, but not to “dismiss it just because of the genre label it happens to be given by the publishing industry”.

Beckett is right to make his plea, but I actually think science fiction isn’t really that ghettoised any more. Perhaps it’s the popularity – and critical acclaim – of science fiction films like Looper, or television series such as Battlestar Galactica, but SF no longer has to be a shameful reading secret. It gets reviewed in mainstream newspapers, and it is dabbled in by literary fiction authors such as Colson Whitehead, who published zombie novel Zone One a couple of years ago, Justin Cronin, with his smash hit vampire epic The Passage, and Scott Spencer, a finalist for the National Book Award who wrote an utterly chilling horror novel in Breed.

Random House is even making a virtue of mainstream novelists’ interest in giving the genre a try, asking major names such as Jeanette Winterson, Helen Dunmore and Sophie Hannah to write horror stories for its new Hammer imprint. And science fiction is also getting on the longlists for major literary prizes – just look at G Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, a journey into djinn country for a “computer geek with girl issues”, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

So I’m not going to worry too much about SF’s chances – it’s becoming more and more obvious to the reading public, I think, that this is an area where it’s possible to find both brilliant writing and brilliant imaginations, and that we don’t have to hide Dark Eden in a copy of Martin Amis to save face. Now we just have to rehabilitate romance, and our work here will be done.