Book Group: This month's title - 'The Ninth Life of Louis Drax' by Liz Jensen
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Your support makes all the difference.Psychological thriller-writing and neurological investigation have a great deal in common. Both throw light into the dark places of the mind. Both proceed from lurid symptoms to underlying causes. Both traffic in lives turned inside out and upside down. And both, pretty often, see the train of logic derailed by surprise and revelation. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is Liz Jensen's fifth novel, and will in due course become an Anthony Minghella film. It starts with an accident and ends with a tragedy. Along the way, it delivers a masterclass in mystery and manipulation that makes us think about the complex kinds of pleasure that such a book can breed. Fragile and precocious, little Louis from Lyon has fallen into a ravine on a tense family outing in the Auvergne. Now, in a deep coma, he remembers (or misremembers?) his incident-packed nine years. Meanwhile, caring but troubled Dr Dannachet, the neurologist, struggles to wrest sense from his baffling case and his baffling family. Eventually, he (and we) will have to take a disorienting journey into "that huge and unknown place beneath the surface of things". Does the reader share the "blindness" of which, in retrospect, the doctor accuses himself? If not, does it spoil the suspense to stay one step ahead of the investigator's mind? Either way, please give us your diagnosis of this probe into the "shadowed chambers" of the human heart.
'The Ninth Life of Louis Drax' by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury, £7.99)
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