Author: Emily Perkins
Published: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2008
From the inside cover:
If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, meticulously shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse just couldn't help but kick back into life. Her hip bones, her red knuckles, the soft skin of her thighs, her fine crackle of hair.
Tom Stone, skinnyish, fortyish, English, is madly in love with his wife Ann, an Australian in self-imposed exile in London. Expecting their first child, they buy a semi-derelict house in Hackney. They believe this is their settled future, despite Tom's stalling career and their spiralling money troubles.
But soon Ann becomes convinced she's being shadowed by a local homeless man whose presence seems like a terrible omen. As her pregnancy progresses she spends hours cleaning and reorganising the house, and sits up all night talking with a new feverish passion. As their child grows, so too does Tom's sense of an impending, nameless threat. Their home seems beset with vermin, smells and strange noises. On the verge of losing the house, Tom makes a decision that he hopes will save their lives.
I found this book to be a very quick & easy read, I really wanted to know what the ending would be. Unfortunately I got to the end & didn't really like the ending. I felt as though I needed to know what really went wrong, what truely made Ann crack. I was thinking up reasons all the way through to the end & felt disappointed that we never got told what Ann really suffered from.
It was an interesting story that I really don't think was about Tom's wife at all, it was more about his perceptions of his wife & how he really didn't know her very well at all.
It was a good read & nice & light compared to the previous book I read.
