Mo Hayder’s first stand-alone novel was published in 2004. Its main protagonist is Grey, a traumatised young woman who moves to Tokyo to track down an expert in the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War, for reasons unexplained. She then gets caught up in some extremely grisly events. Her narrative is intercut with the memories of the academic, who was living with his pregnant wife in Nanjing, China, as the Japanese army came inexorably closer.
You should read it because: it’s a brilliant example of an unreliable narrator, who is too disturbed to really think about what happened to them; it’s very moving while also being visceral, gory, and in parts terrifying; it’s a great example of how to use two narratives to create tension.
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