The Fury
Alex Michaelides
An impulse buy while getting emergency bananas from Waitrose… attracted by the cover, which turns out to be quite clever showing the island within multiple, enclosing frames (of narrative).
We have a deeply unrealiable narrator (who admits this upfront!) and a small cast of characters, largely actors isolated on a small Greek Island by a storm (“the Fury” of the title - although this could also describe some of the characters and their actions, another clever touch).
I started out really enjoying this and was invested in all the characters and their situation and did find it annoying when all this was up-ended by yet another plot twist. I felt a bit cheated, even though we’d been warned about the narrator but I did get over that and have finished the whole book in 3 days so it clearly didn’t annoy me enough to stop reading!
This is a clever book by an accomplished author, indeed it is almost but not quite too clever to be a great read by the author has just finessed it on the right side of “great”, although I’m not convinced it would make a good re-read unless some years down the road when I’ve forgotten a lot of it!
I can see this being a good (if possibly quite confusing) film, especially if you try to tell the story without some sort of meta-narration.