Notes

As a novel, The Girl on The Train sure has an afterlife. Released in 2015, written by Paula Hawkins, the latest film it spawned was a 2021 Bollywood production (see pic). The amnesia thriller also inspired two other films. I look back on how the original novel became a phenomenon, not merely a runaway best seller, but a marker of the early move in popular fiction towards ‘domestic noir’. My interest lies in the memory loss factor the novel relies on for the telling of its story of ordinary women’s lives gone terribly wrong. The memory loss type? Alcohol induced.

Alice Howland is a linguistics expert and professor teaching at Harvard University, thus when she forgets what the word ‘lexicon’ means while delivering a lecture, it is more telling than if someone else were to have forgotten it. So begins 50-year-old Alice’s downward slide into early-onset Alzheimers in the novel Still Alice, by Lisa Genova.… Read More »Still Alice

If you think the first English detective novel, written in Dickens’s day, would be too dated to bother reading, think again. The Moonstone remains to this day a cracking good yarn, offering engaging and colourful characters, a dark mystery tinged with the exotic and laden with social critique, plenty of suspense and an unexpected ending.… Read More »The Moonstone