Read 1 of 2024. First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

Title: First Lie Wins
Author: Ashley Elston
Publisher: Hachette
Imprint: Headline
ISBN: 9781472295330
Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Pages: 376
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

It is absolutely the best feeling when a thriller delivers, because you never know with books in that genre. I think there are about hundreds of thousands of them, and well, while most start very promisingly, they also often lose steam in the middle, hurtling towards the end with great speed, and often gaping holes in the plot. This wasn’t the case with, “First Lie Wins”. It is heady, super-fast, and well-etched characters that make you want to know them more as the pages turn.

It is the usual fare – Evie Porter seems to have it all – the perfect boyfriend, the perfect life, a house in a classy neighbourhood, and a group of friends. Of course there’s a catch – Evie Porter doesn’t exist. She isn’t who she claims to be, and now another woman has come to town claiming to be her – from another life, and she must do what it takes to protect herself and her real identity.

In all of this, there is love, betrayal, the motivations of Evie Porter and her boss, her associates, and how we take on identities when there is nowhere left to go. Elston’s writing is quick-paced, though it did become a little bit of a drag towards the middle, but once again picked tempo and was at it right till the end. A good mystery or a thriller novel to my mind keeps you wanting more, keeps you on the edge, and yet also throws enough breadcrumbs for the reader to get involved in the process of unearthing information and figuring out what is going on.

“First Lie Wins” kept me turning the pages, made me feel for Evie and Ryan, and what was going on, made me reach out for a nice cocktail and immerse myself in the read, which I did.

Las Madres by Esmeralda Santiago

I absolutely love reading books about families, and at the heart of it, the women who are at the heart of them, the ones who create families, nurture them, and see through them. What’s even more wondrous is when they create families such as these with their dearest friends. I remember feeling the same way reading, “Las Madres”, as I did when I first read, “The Joy Luck Club”.

Las Madres is the story of three mothers – Luz, Ada, and Shirley, and the two daughters – Graciela and Marysol. They are all bonded for life – though they live in different places – all hailing from Puerto Rico – daughters born in New York though – each of them struggling to find their place in the world, living life day after day. The story is set in two different time periods – the 70s, and 2017, told alternatively, with different perspectives and voices – as secrets come to fore, ambition is noticed, desire runs deep, and friendships are formed and forged for life, through thick and thin of it all.

I enjoyed the 70s timeline more, but that’s just because I have lived through the 2010s, and the 70s timeline seemed very nostalgic and had me hooked to the past. Santiago takes us through the emotional turbulence amongst families, of how friends become families we never knew we needed, and more than anything beautifully weaves the story with the political upheavals of its time, and the issues of the day.

Santiago builds characters with care and love, easing you into their lives, the characters linger, and as you get to know them – the five women, and the people associated with them – the story remains and in turn makes this impact in your heart and brain, not very easy to let go off.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

I literally read this one with a fervour that I hadn’t known in a while. “Biography of X” is all over the place and that’s why I loved it so. It is funny, it is philosophical, quite a rollercoaster ride of the human condition, and above all it is audacious and masterfully constructed.

Biography of X is the biography of a deceased woman who called herself X. It is her life seen through the eyes of her wife who is left behind. There is a lot of angst, layers of revelations, emotions that run high and low, and above all a sense of “how much do we know people”, or “do we know them at all” kind of feeling you are left with, once done with the book.

The novel plays with so many themes, and very soon the joy is in seeing how there is also an alternate timeline of the US History in a world very different from ours. There is also the concept of “who gets to tell whose story” and at the end of it all, do we have liberties because of our relationships?

Lacey’s writing is razor-sharp, deeply empathetic, and also funny in many parts. She ensures that there is a sense of mystery, and as a reader somehow she also gives you the agency to decide small outcomes for yourself as the story progresses. Through the characters, we witness the history of places, of time, and memory, and how fragile all of it can be. A read not to be missed.

Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda

I enjoyed this one a lot. It took me on this rollercoaster ride and brought me back – all grounded, and introspecting on the nature of human beings. It is brutal, dark, funny, and humane in a very strange way – ironical and also heart-warming at the same time, if that makes any sense. 

Sing Her Down is a feminist Western through and through – about two women and the obsessive nature of finding out more about the other, even to just undo them in public. Florence and Diosmary are characters that Pochoda has built with great ambition, grit, and also humour to a very large extent. Both so different, and yet so similar. 

Pochoda’s writing reminded me of a Cormac McCarthy – the landscape, the humidity and the harshness seeped into my skin as a reader – lending all so beautifully to the progression of the plot and the characters’ brutality as well.

Sing Her Down is twisted, intelligent, crackles with wit and energy on almost every page – both characters trying to find their place in the world and truths about each other after being released early from prison due to the pandemic.

I loved the story and the writing. It is not gentle, it isn’t kind – Pochoda ensures from the very first page to tell the readers that this won’t be rosy or kind. The themes of female victimization, domestic abuse, and how the prison system also works to some extent is realistically explored and very difficult to ignore when reading and perhaps one shouldn’t ignore it at all – it needs to be seen for what it is.

Sing Her Down is a book that everyone must read for its realness, to understand and see the unseen women, to hear their stories, and understand places so different from our realities.

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

I do not know how to describe what I am feeling after finishing this book. It made me joyful, made me very sad, I was left feeling hopeful, feeling that I have lost someone, and made me want to dream all over again. The book begins in Sarajevo. The book transports us to 1914, the assassination that triggered the first world war.

In all of this action there is Rafael Pinto – Sephardic-Jewish, Vienna education pharmacist, who is homosexual, uses opium to free himself, and is bold enough to kiss cavalry officers who come to his shop. The war sends him off all the way across to the Eurasian landmass, and eventually he is in Shanghai, 35 years later. The book is epic – not only in its scope but also when it comes to the human heart. Pinto’s losses are palpable. When his lover Osman, whom he meets during the war, goes missing, we see the melancholy that is unbearable, the kind that can be gone only when you drown yourself in alcohol or other substances. And how it all changes for him one fine day, when he encounters someone.

In all of this there is also comfort in a way that I found extremely surprising and also taken in by the twist. Pinto’s character made me bleed for him. I wanted to hold him and tell him that it will all be okay. He never loses hope – never losing his sensitivity, his poetic self, no matter how hard his world is crumbling around him. Hemon’s prose makes you read in different languages. You are reading English, of which you are aware, but there is also Bosnian and German and Turkish and Spanish that enters these pages – with no explanation (which is a great thing to my mind) – on one hand language helps binding people in the narrative, and on the other hand it excludes.

Hemon’s novel is magnificent – it is about love that is there in so many forms, love that makes you question everything, and how it ends up redeeming you for all that is worth – The World and all That It Holds is a coming-of-age-novel, it is a novel about friendship, about what binds us, about who we are as people, about the repercussions of war, of people and who they are at the core, but above all about love in its most simple and pure form.