With echoes of the time-bending brilliance of Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Gillian McAllister's unputdownable thriller Wrong Place Wrong Time presents a devastated mother with multiple opportunities to avert the murder that her son has committed. In this exclusive piece, Gillian recommends her favourite novels in the rising genre of maternal page-turners.
The past few years have seen the rise of the maternal thriller – novels either directly about the experience of motherhood or including protagonists who parent children alongside plot, and there is something so compelling to me about these. All five of the below thrillers ultimately pose the question: how far would you go to help your child? And all of them provide different and multilayered answers, never shying away from breaking taboos or falling into cliché. Importantly, too – for me, anyway – all of them say the unsaid: that life with a baby or a child is hard, especially for women, and life is better for talking about that.
A dark and desperate tale of a new mother whose child is not all they seem, with its roots in We Need to Talk About Kevin. What I particularly loved about The Push is that it takes off-limit but ordinary emotions experienced by mothers – feeling frazzled, resentful or identity-less – and stretches and distorts them so they are just on the cusp of relatability. You might wrinkle your nose in distaste at things you have yourself felt: a masterclass in holding a mirror up to the female experience. It’s also a riveting mystery, a did-she-do-it rather than a whodunnit, with an answer that is impossible to predict.
A dual timeline from the queen of the motherhood thriller. A young couple disappears one night, only for a note saying dig here to emerge one year later. The Night She Disappeared of course answers the central question of where Tallulah and Zach are – Jewell is nothing if not excellent at plot – but unlike other domestic suspense novels, this one becomes a moody exploration of what it means to parent a young adult, what that might look like, and what your responsibilities are as a mother with a child in the hinterland between baby- and adulthood. It also has one of the best character-led denouements I’ve read in some time.
A conceptual thriller by an author who always favours a high-wire act and absolutely always pulls it off. Beth sees her old friend’s children out one day, but they haven’t aged at all in twelve years. How could this be? As always, Hannah takes an irresistible premise and runs with it, without ever stretching the plot beyond credulity. The answer is so satisfying that it feels obvious, but you’d never have thought of it yourself. What sets this novel apart, though, is the relatability of the middle-aged, wry protagonist, and her relationship with her own daughter, the fabulously witty and enthralling Zannah. Achingly funny, sharp and sincere, their love beats joyfully through the otherwise dark heart of the book.
Ruth Ware is one of the most versatile crime thriller authors out there. She’s written about hen parties, AI houses, a shareholder’s buyout meeting gone wrong, and miscarriages of justice, but in this one she turns her hand to the elite of Oxbridge and a crime committed a decade earlier. It’s a fabulous whodunnit with a real heartstopper of a denouement, but what I loved most about this is the careful depiction of the heroine’s pregnancy: never a driver of the plot, but all the same Ware captures so well the ongoing humdrum of midwife appointments, high blood pressure and ongoing anxiety, while adding stakes to the safety of the protagonist, too. Read it to find out who really killed the IT girl, but also to experience first-hand how it feels to be pregnant and vulnerable. Ruth Ware can write anything and anyone, and I will be reading all of them.
It was Jodi Picoult who first introduced me to women who write about being mothers. Almost all of her books contain a strand about a mother trying to protect her child (a shoutout in particular to both The Pact and Nineteen Minutes) but A Spark of Light is one of her best, covering a siege at a reproductive clinic. Told backwards, it asks the question, what makes a life? Picoult is one of a handful of writers whose every work I will read, and it is only in her hands that a backwards narrative could work so well, with reverse payoffs. As the reader, you find out how the novel ends, but then what those endings would have meant to the characters. It’s a book you’ll want to read again.
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?
Comments
There are currently no comments.