Death and the Seaside (Salt Modern Fiction) - Softcover

packs a mighty, subversive punch

So I've ended up with the thought that it's a psychological thriller about life, art, and inescapable fate - lets hope the author thought it was too! In another writer's hands, this would easily have turned into a high drama psychological thriller, Moore takes an altogether subtler approach, letting the menace slowly ooze out; I rather found myself wishing that she'd written Gone Girl ...

Moore weaves a particular kind of magic from everyday details, and her way of making the banal thrilling reminded me of Alice Furse's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, albeit with a rather macabre slant. Death and the Seaside is a story of manipulation and imagination, peppered with literary references, as much about the creative process as it is about the characters. The blend of genres and influences makes it feel, as many great novels do, quite unlike anything else I've read.

Death and the Seaside is a psychologically astute novel of power, control and influence which will make you wonder how real your memories are and where your fears come from. Blending layers of memory and imagination there are signposts to the end everywhere, if you only know where to look. Clever and really quite disturbing.

It is a gripping tale of two women, of stories, memories and suggestibility.

✭✭✭✭✭ Moore’s masterful blend of genres and influences makes her third novel feel, as many great novels do, quite unlike anything else I’ve read. In entwining Bonnie and Sylvia’s tales, Death and the Seaside delves deep into its characters’ psyches; the result is quiet and brilliant, unsettling yet thoughtful, dreamlike and thrilling.

Death and the Seaside is a tense, tightly plotted and darkly comical novel about writing, creativity, the power of suggestion and the quaint postcard version of the British seaside. Moore’s writing is electric, it sizzles, and is alive with things unsaid. Though it’s not a long novel, it is powerful and it certainly lingers, moving in and out of your mind like the tides.

Book of the day. Dense, complex, thought-provoking, it manages to be at once a fairytale and a philosophical treatise, high-octane thriller and literary interrogation. Like the dreams that haunt Bonnie’s night-times, it holds its secrets close, and repays careful rereading. The end of the novel, abrupt and death-haunted, feels as neat and tight as a key in a lock, and sheds light on the mysteries that have gone before.

She is both gifted stylist and talented creator of a new English grotesque.

With an abandoned degree behind her and a thirtieth birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents’ home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, where she comes under strange influences. As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they should go away together – to the seaside, perhaps.

The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.