I approached this book very much aware of the fall out from John Boyne’s inclusion in the long list for the 2025 Polari Prize and yet also not wanted to let that colour my reading of this particular book.
I also was lukewarm about the film version of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but again tried to put a pin in that while reading this book.
The opening part is so strong, the intensity of that moment when Catherine, Sean, and Jack are thrown together and then torn apart, it is a brilliant short story – the following 640 pages never really match it – except the part in New York when Cyril and Bastiaan are tending to the needs of those with AIDS until a walk in Central Park ends in violence and death, but again that could work as a standalone short story – there isn’t really any connection between the two. Rather than writing an epic novel it might have been better to have been a collection of short stories – but novels sell and short stories don’t.
By the end of it, if I am honest I just sort of got bored, because after so much drama and so many plot twists the shock value wares thin.
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