Holding by Graham Norton

Published: October 2016, Hodder and Stoughton

Genre: fiction

Themes: Ireland, crime, secrets, relationships, family

My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤

I went into the library looking for a book by Graham Norton as I keep seeing positive comments about his books on Twitter, and I felt I might be missing something.

Holding seems to be his first book, and the library copy has a Radio 2 Book Club sticker on it, and I think it's fair to say that it's a perfect book for that reading group. It's a chatty style of writing that I could imagine would be how Graham would recount a tale if he was in conversation with someone, and there are sufficient strong elements to the plot-line to keep it interesting to the end.

When I first started reading I thought it was going to be a bit thin on plot, as much of the story involved character descriptions, and I was starting to wonder how it was going to pull together. Then the dramatic events began to unfold and, once I could see how everyone fitted in, I read the rest of it quite quickly.

Most of the characters are not particularly likable people, and it's difficult to have much sympathy for some of them when things don't go their way, but the story moves along well and doesn't get bogged down in unnecessary descriptive passages. Before I started the book, I did wonder if Graham would write in an Irish poetic style and it was almost a relief when he didn't. I heard him say in an interview recently that he feels his later books have got better as he has grown more confident, so I shall look out for those to read later.

Comments

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