The Girl on the Train, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Quality of Silence

Crime thrillers are not my usual choice, but the hype and forthcoming movie of this extremely popular book by Paula Hawkins had me intrigued. The Girl on the Train is actually a very well plotted story, full of the usual twists and turns and what turned out to be useful clues along the way. The great thing for me was that there is no gratuitous violence or creepy shocks. Just a real page turner that you want to savour and not necessarily get to the end too soon. Surprisingly good.

My sixth Anne Tyler and one of her best. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant we are right at the heart of one fragmented family, the Tulls. The mother, Pearl, has brought up her three children on her own after her husband Beck left when they were young. Cody, Ezra and Jenny are now grown but, like us all, memories of their their childhoods often surface, not always in a good way.

I liked how each of the ten chapters was told from the point of view of one of the family. It is Ezra who works in the restaurant but "the family as a whole never yet finished one of his dinners--it was as if what they couldn't get right they had to keep returning to." Again and again.

The Quality of Silence was somewhat disappointing  after having enjoyed Rosamund Lupton's previous two classy thrillers. I lost interest in Yasmin and Ruby's journey across Alaska as I thought it went on far too long. The format of telling Yasmin's story in the first person alternating with her deaf ten year old daughter speaking in the first person worked well to begin with but then became a little too predictable. There are moments of high tension and drama, but for me they couldn't sustain the bleak Alaskan winter.