Water, water everywhere and also by John Boyne

I am a big fan of John Boyne so when I saw that he had a new book out in November 2023, I jumped at the chance to read it. At 176 pages, I devoured this in one sitting.

“The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious women on the run from her past. But scandals follow like hunting dogs. And she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes? Escaping her old life might seem like a good idea but the choices she has made throughout her marriage have consequences. Here, on the island, Vanessa must reflect on what she did – and did not do. Only then can she discover whether she is worthy of finding peace at all.”

This book certainly packs a lot into its 176 pages. This book is very emotive and contains a lot of political commentary on a range of subjects including complicity, religion and the role of men and women, as well as politics itself. The main character Vanessa (aka Willow) is well developed. She is intriguing right from the beginning – I guess with so few pages, Boyne doesn’t have time to muck around. Every page packs a punch. Boyne is such a talented writer, and I would almost swear that this book was written by a woman, simply by the way he executes the (female) main character so eloquently and with sensitivity – not an easy feat.

This book traverses some very dark subjects, so be warned that this isn’t a light and happy read, but it does this in such a way that there is a level of intrigue from start to finish. The story unfolds in such a way that you want to keep reading, to find out exactly what is going on here, and why exactly is Vanessa hiding on the island?

“Water has been the undoing of me. It has been the undoing of my family. We swim in the womb. We are composed of it. We drink it. We are drawn to it throughout our lives, more than mountains, deserts, or canyons. But it is terrible. It kills.”

This has cemented for me that I will always pick up a book by Boyne and was delighted to discover that this book is a part of a (quasi) series – there is another book coming out which follows a different character that we are introduced to in Water. This is the first of four interlinked novellas, Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I am definitely going to pick these up when they are published, because life is too short to read bad books.