4 Books to Read Over a Winter Weekend
Cozy up to
the fire and celebrate your day off with the kind of "earthy, reverent,
poetic and wry" fiction that makes you feel "what it is to be fully
alive in the world."
By Dawn Raffel
2 of 4
Grist Mill Road
By Christopher J. Yates
352 pages;
Picador
Two of
life's delicious pleasures—gourmet delectations and a sinister, plot-twisty
tale—come together in this intelligent thriller. When we first meet
Patrick, he is 12 years old and witness to a horrible attack in the woods, committed
by a friend against a girl named Hannah. Flash forward and 38-year-old Patrick is
living in Manhattan, tinkering with a food blog and chewing on his rage at
having been fired from his job. Turns out that he's married to Hannah, now a
successful crime reporter who continues to suffer from nightmares. She lost an
eye in that long-ago assault, during which—as far as she knows—Patrick
saved her life. But is that really what happened? As the story shifts back and
forth in time and changes narrators, it becomes increasingly hard to know whom
to trust, especially when Matthew—the boy convicted of the crime—reappears
in the guise of a possible investor in the culinary company Patrick dreams of starting.
"The reality," Matthew says, "is there are more than two sides
to most stories. Truth is seldom a lens, truth is a kaleidoscope." As
Patrick becomes increasingly unhinged and Hannah reveals secrets of her own,
all three end up back in their upstate New York hometown for a spectacular and
deadly denouement.
— Dawn Raffel
Published 01/03/2018