:: This post is merely an encomium of Tana French. That’s all.
Authors are readers.
I read, approximately, 4 bazillion books a month. I have a library card, an ebook reader, a library in my house, a university library I can walk too, and no food because I spend all my money on books.
Authors also have the authors they love. An author I love, and I mean love, is Tana French. (I even wrote an article about her.)
A long time ago (in the year 2014), I started reading a book by Tana French called IN THE WOODS. “What is this curious book,” I thought, “that so many of my novelist-friends had recommended to me?”
It didn’t matter what genre these authors wrote, they all loved Tana French’s writing.
I finished IN THE WOODS in approximately five minutes. Fortunately, it turned out, the book was the first in a series, the “Dublin Murder Squad” books. I bought the second book immediately: THE LIKENESS.
Reading THE LIKENESS, I realized there was something strange going on. I could no longer function as an ordinary human. I had lost taste for food. I had lost any need for sleep.
And then I was, without even knowing how it happened, in FAITHFUL PLACE (the third of the Dublin Murder Squad books), a place no one was supposed to be, so dark yet so lovely, so rife with sadness. Where Scorcher drove everyone bonkers with his rule-following, and the tragedy crushed your heart. The book crushed me. I barely escaped with my soul intact.
Obviously, I needed more.
Tana French FLIPPED MY BRAIN with BROKEN HARBOR (the fourth book), making me love, LOVE Kennedy (HOW?) and then, and then, and then…
All holy hell broke loose with THE SECRET PLACE.
I will never be the same again. It’s one of those books that reshapes you. You feel grateful for having read it.
The problem was, when I finished THE SECRET PLACE, that life-reshaping book, I realized I’d reached the end of French’s novels. Bereft, I sat on my window seat (yes, I really have one, and yes it really is flanked by bookshelves). I was widowed by literature.
So then this week, I open up Amazon, and there it is, THERE IT IS, PEOPLE. Tana French has a new book coming in October, THE TRESPASSER.
*faints because can’t wait till October.*
