A Game For All The Family - Sophie Hannah

What an ingenious and sinister little book this is! It subtly manages to unsettle the reader right from the outset when Justine Merrison has a strange premonition. She, her husband Alex and their daughter Ellen are moving out of London, Justine leaving a stressful job as a TV drama executive to settle for a quieter life in their new home in Devon. The premonition isn't wrong, and Justine's life is far from quiet with the strangest things that go on in that part of the world.

What is terrific about A Game For All The Family is how Sophie Hannah builds on similar little hunches and feelings in several other simple little events that on the surface don't seem worth worrying about, but are very odd if you think about them too much. As a TV drama producer, Justine is well aware of the concept of the 'unreliable narrator', but you begin to doubt yourself the reliability of what Justine is telling you. How much is real and how much is cumulatively built up and blown out of proportion by Justine's imaginative interpretation of hunches? 

It's at least clear that something strange is going on. Not least because there seems to be another 'unreliable narrator' in a story that Justine's daughter has suddenly taken an urge to write about an 'alternate' family living in their new house who are subject to the murderous acts of one of the youngest daughters. These chapters, which bear some parallel with events in the real world, appear at regular intervals before each chapter and really add to the sense of a weird conspiracy being waged against Justine.

Although it is fascinating to see how things develop, what really counts here in such a tense, and twistedly imaginative fiction is how convincingly the author can carry off the resolution and rationale for it all. Sophie Hannah comes up with some credible explanations, which is no mean feat, but some of the character behaviour and motivations are questionable. On the other hand, this just leaves just enough doubt for the reader to question whether they've really got the whole story from Justine here. A Puzzle for All the Family.

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