My Year in Books 2024: September

Well, just one book on this month's list. Like last month, I seem to have been so busy with writing and research that I haven't had much time for reading for fun. Ah well. I'm sure I'll catch up.

In case you're curious, here are my reviews from the rest of the year so far: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August

Fellside by M.R. Carey (2016)

I loved The Girl With All the Gifts (who didn’t?), but somehow I missed Fellside when it came out. I might be late to the party, but I finally decided to put that right. Fellside is a long book, but I found myself quite immersed in it. It’s also not quite the story I was expecting. The story begins with Jess Moulson, a young woman who wakes up with horrific burns and no clear memories of how she got them. When she’s arrested and tried for starting a house fire in which a young boy died, Jess accepts that she’s done something terrible. Jess is convicted and sent to Fellside, a maximum security prison in Yorkshire. There’s something in Fellside – a ghost, I guess you could call it – that wants to speak to Jess, if she’ll listen to the message it has for her. I went into this one expecting the story to focus on the events that led up to the fire for which Jess was charged, but this turned out to be more of a side-plot. The real story is about what’s going on inside Fellside, and a drug operation run by the larger-than-life Harriet Grace. I’ll admit I worked out what was going on before the big reveal (specifically the one related to the ghost that’s speaking to Jess), and I did find some elements of the story to be a bit too drawn out. However, it’s very readable and at times I couldn’t put it down.