Whatever You Love
Louise Doughty
Whatever You Love
Two police officers knock on Laura’s door. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed. When justice is slow, Laura decides to take her own revenge and begins to track down the man responsible. Laura’s grief reopens old wounds and she is thown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty’s father David, their marriage and his subsequent desertion of her for another woman. Haunted by her past and driven by her need to discover the truth, Laura discovers just how far she is prepared to go for love, desire and retribution.
4.1 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Crime, Thrillers & Mystery, General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
320 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
June 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-0571254750 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
Two police officers knock on Laura’s door. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed. When justice is slow, Laura decides to take her own revenge and begins to track down the man responsible. Laura’s grief reopens old wounds and she is thown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty’s father David, their marriage and his subsequent desertion of her for another woman. Haunted by her past and driven by her need to discover the truth, Laura discovers just how far she is prepared to go for love, desire and retribution.
Reviews
The Financial Times
Kate Williams
“Doughty’s precise, spare style and skilled plotting is perfectly suited to the exploration of a practical and pragmatic woman plunged into terrible grief… The story is unsentimental, unsparing and entirely compelling. Beautifully constructed and rawly emotional, this is a starkly brilliant and moving investigation of the depths of human despair.”
21/06/2010
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The Observer
Elizabeth Day
“The emotional power of Doughty's prose is such that the reader is complicit in Laura's journey from loss to retribution. Doughty forces us to confront the darkness that lies beneath the skin. The result is a brilliant and brutal novel that continues to unsettle long after the final page has been turned.”
06/06/2010
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The Sunday Times
Elizabeth Buchan
“Laura is grieving for her nine-year-old daughter, killed in a hit-and-run accident: a situation terrible to contemplate, let alone read about. Yet — and this indicates the author’s skill and the depth of feeling reverberating through her writing — the portrayal of a bereaved mother is so precisely and unflinchingly articulated that any reservations about reading such brutally emotive material become secondary.”
25/07/2010
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Times Literary Supplement
Anjali Joseph
“...if plot is allowed to take over towards the end, this tightly constructed, well-written novel shines for the intensity it brings to ordinary lives. The middle-aged man going through a breakdown is a conventional subject of contemporary fiction; Doughty makes a case for fiction to engage with middle-aged women’s inner lives in an equally serious way.”
09/07/2010
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The Guardian
Susanna Rustin
“[A] subtle thriler... emotionally raw, sexually frank, psychologically unpredictable.”
03/07/2010
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The Independent
Jane Jakeman
“Doughty excels at conveying the harrowing grief of Laura's bereavement and her slow emergence into a world entirely changed by the death of her daughter, and skilfully handles a tense and complex plot. This is a powerful portrait of loss and its psychological consequences.”
25/06/2010
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The Daily Mail
Stephanie Cross
“Novels about love and loss are ten-a-penny, but this one brilliantly defies expectations to the very last page. Unsparing, challenging and terrifically compelling.”
28/06/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Ophelia Field
“Like Zoë Heller, Doughty is masterful at combining the texture of ordinary, smugly middle-class, contemporary life with the hidden cliff edges of violence and hatred. In this case, however, when the drama heightens and she drags us to the very edge, she loses her emotional stranglehold on the reader.”
27/06/2010
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