Peachy Reads

A destination wedding with a headline-grabbing couple takes place on a windswept island off the western coast of Ireland. One of the wedding party is murdered, that is alluded to at the start, and the book gradually unspools the events leading up to the deed, while revealing backstories and secrets. This book unfolds like an Agatha Christie novel. There are several suspects who would have had ample motivation to become a murderer, and it is up to the reader to guess who it might be.

All the Light We Cannot See was such a memorable tour-de-force that when the author published his next novel after a gap of seven years, I was anxious to read it. Cloud Cuckoo Land similarly interweaves parallel narratives, which All the Light did so successfully. This time it’s several stories, separated by both time and space. Most memorable was the description of the siege of Constantinople in 1453 with the characters of Omeir and Anna. It was probably this portion of the book that I enjoyed most and was most reminiscent of the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light . There is a contemporary thread based on a solitary act of eco-terrorism in a public library in Idaho, and a future thread with climate refugees, set in a space ship on its way to a far-flung planet with an atmosphere similar to Earth’s. All these competing narratives only really start to stitch themselves together about halfway through this 600-page opus. The surprise ending, along with the clever...