This month's Book of the Month is The Favour by Nora Murphy.
This gripping thriller is about two perfect strangers: Leah Dawson and McKenna Hawkins.
Leah and McKenna are smart, successful women who live in the perfect house with the perfect cars and in safe, perfect suburbs.
They are married to hugely successful, charming and good-looking men.
But soon after they marry these men, the cracks start to show and both feel trapped in terrifying marriages.
Leah’s picture-perfect relationship has become abusive and she turns to alcohol to escape.
Her husband, Liam, is a sought-after family lawyer and wants Leah to be the perfect wife, but when she loses her job and starts gaining weight, her husband locks her in the basement until she is “perfect” again.
McKenna is married to Zack, a top psychiatrist who forces his wife to quit her job as a doctor after she has a miscarriage.
He cancels her gym membership, won’t let her eat chips and says she needs to focus on getting pregnant.
Both women are desperate to escape their marriages, but leaving would be dangerous. But staying would be worse.
I could not put this book down. It is gripping from the first paragraph.
And the scariest part is that this is happening now in many homes.
Domestic violence is not an easy topic to handle, but author Murphy has made the women’s stories so realistic and frightening that she has bought these characters to life.
You and I probably know a McKenna or a Leah, we just don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.
This book reminded me a lot of Girl on a Train. It is suspenseful and so beautifully written.
I highly recommend this book.
Mini reviews by Bargain Books
Elephants of Thula Thula
Françoise Malby-Anthony is the owner of a game reserve in SA with a remarkable family of elephants whose adventures have touched hearts around the world. The herd’s feisty matriarch, Frankie, knows who’s in charge at Thula Thula, and it’s not Francoise. But when Frankie becomes ill, and the authorities threaten to remove or cull some of the herd if the reserve doesn’t expand, Françoise is in a race against time to save her beloved elephants.
The Ink Black Heart
Robin and her business partner, Cormoran Strike, become drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie’s true identity. But with a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts to navigate, Strike and Robin find themselves embroiled in a case that stretches their powers of deduction to the limits — and which threatens them in new and horrifying ways.
A gripping, fiendishly clever mystery, The Ink Black Heart is a true tour-de-force.
Black Beach
In 2013, SA businessman Daniel Janse van Rensburg set off to Equatorial Guinea in West Africa to finalise a legitimate airline contract with a local politician. Within days, Daniel was arrested by the local Rapid Intervention Force and detained without trial in the infamous Bllack Beach prison’s “Guantánamo” cells. This is his remarkable story of survival over nearly two years, made possible by his unwavering faith and the humanity of a few fellow inmates.
All The Broken Places
Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same mansion block in London for decades. She leads a comfortable, quiet life, despite her dark and disturbing past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Germany more than 70 years before. She doesn’t talk about the post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, the commandant of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.
